
Pass . v A 
Book 







NATIONAL LIFE AND THOUGHT 



J> 



NATIONAL LIFE 



AND 



THOUGHT 



OF THE VARIOUS 



NATIONS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD 



H Series of H?>oresses 



EIRIKR MAGNUSSON, M.A. ; Prof. J. E. THOROLD ROGERS 

J. THEODORE BENT; F. II. GROOME ; 

Mrs. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM; Prof. PULSZKY; 

W. R. MORFILL, M.A. ; 

AND OTHERS. 



NEW YORK 
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

MDCCCXCI, 



ilr. 
9 O'GC 



y<* 



PREFACE. 

The Lectures contained in this Volume were delivered on 
Sunday afternoon, at South Place Institute, during the Session 
1889-90, and were designed to give information, in a popular 
form, with regard to the national development and modes of 
political action among the different nations throughout the 
world, by means of sympathetic and trustworthy accounts of 
their history, national aspiration, and modes of government, 
it being thought that a general dissemination of such knowledge 
would not only improve our Institutions, but, by stimulating our 
interest in foreign countries, tend to promote international 
amity. 

The Committee take this opportunity of expressing their 
obligations to the different Lecturers for the willingness with 
which they have made it possible to carry on this work, and 
trust that the general public, to whom this Volume is now offered, 
will appreciate the information therein contained as highly as 
did the audiences to whom the Lectures were originally addressed. 

WM. SHEOWRiNG, ) Hon. Secretaries, 
CONRAD W. THIES j Institute Committee. 

South Place Institute. 



CONTENTS. 



i. The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question 
By M. Sevasly . . . . . 

II. Austria. By Dr. S. Schidrowitz 

in. Hungary. By Professor Augustus Pulszky 

iv. Germany — Politics. By Sidney Whitman 

v. German Culture. By Sidney Whitman . 

vi. Russia. By W. R. Morfill, M.A. 

vii. Poland. By Adam Gielgud . 

viii. Italy. By J. Stephen Jeans . 

ix. Spain. By Mrs. Cunninghame Graham 

x. Norway. By II. L. Br.^kstad 

xi. Sweden. By Eirikr Magnusson, M.A. 

xn. Denmark and Iceland. By Eirikr Magnusson, M.A. 

xiii. Lessons from the Dutch Republic. By Professor J. E 
Thorold Rogers ..... 

xiv. Belgium. By Alfred Wathelet 

xv. Switzerland. By Howard Hodgkin, M.A, 

xvi. Modern Life and Thought amongst the Greeks, By 
J. Theodore Bent 

xvii. Ottoman Empire. By H. Anthony Salmone 

Appendix — "Why does not the Sick Man die?" 

xviii. Egypt. By J. C. M'Coan .... 

xix. Servia and Montenegro. By J. C. Cotton Minchin 

xx. Jews in their Relation to other Races. By Rev. S 
Singer ...... 

xxi. The Gypsies. By F. H. Groome 



i 
19 

33 

53 

69 

§7 

"3 

135 

157 

181 

201 

217 

237 
251 
267 



323 
343 

363 
379 



THE ARMENIANS, ARMENIA, AND THE 
ARMENIAN QUESTION. 



M. SEVASLY. 



WHEN Mr. Wm. Sheowring, the Honorary Secretary of the 
South Place Institute, requested me to lecture on the 
Armenians and on the Armenian Question, he invited 
my attention to a statement that appeared in the Diplomatic Fly 
Sheet, in which the Armenians are classed by C. D. Collett as a 
religious community, and not as a nation. To refute the assertion 
will constitute the subject-matter of the first part of this paper. 

The Armenians are a nation, and one of the oldest nations in 
the world. Descended from the great Aryan race, they are as 
ancient as the Jews, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, 
and the Greeks. The antiquity of the Armenian nation is 
attested by ancient writers. Thus we find that Alexander Poly- 
histor, a Greek writer (75 B.C.), affirming that the Armenians 
were known as a nation twenty centuries before Christ ; and in 
support of this assertion, he says that the Armenians made an 
expedition against that powerful maritime people, the Phoenicians, 
whom they defeated, and that among the prisoners captured was 
the nephew of Abraham the patriarch. Again we find the name 
of Armenia and Ararat designated in the Bible, in Herodotus, in 
Strabo, and others. Moreover, cuneiform inscriptions on the 
celebrated Rock of Van also attest the antiquity of the Armenian 
people. 

According to Armenian chronology, the foundation of the first 
Armenian kingdom dates so far back as 2540 B.C. As with the 
history of other ancient countries, that of Armenia begins with 
legend : " Haig, a local chief, who lived in the country of Ararat, 
migrated with his sons and daughters to Senaar in Mesopotamia. 
While they lived in those regions the Tower of Babel was erected, 
and the Babylonian Empire was ruled by Belus. Haig, unwilling 
to submit to the authority of Belus, returned with his family of 



2 National Life and Thought. 

about three hundred persons to the fatherland, where he incor- 
porated himself with the earliest settlers. Belus marched against 
him with his warriors all clad in iron armour, and supplied with 
powerful spears and bows and arrows. Yet destiny was about 
to found a great nation and a vast empire. The small band of 
Haig proved victorious, and Belus fell by an arrow from the bow 
of Haig. 

Victory and the spoils of war inflaming their breasts, the Haigs 
(or Armenians) went on conquering, until a territory stretching 
from the Caspian Sea to the east of Cilicia on the Mediterranean, 
on the west ; and from the borders of the Pontus on the north to 
the confines of Assyria at the south, formed one vast and powerful 
Haiasdan or Armenia. 

The name of Armenia 1 was derived from Aram, the sixth 
successor of Haig, who became so renowned by his exploits that 
from his time the surrounding nations designated the country as 
Aramia, after his name, which, in course of time, has been cor- 
rupted into the modern nomenclature of "Armenia." 

The height of glory was only attained during the reign of 
Tigranes. " It is but a few days' journey from the country of the 
Cabiri or Sebastia, present Sivas, into Armenia," says Lucullus, 
"where Tigranes, King of kings, is seated surrounded with that 
power which has wrested Asia from the Parthians, which carries 
Grecian Colonies into Media, subdues Syria and Palestine." 

Again, Cicero, alluding to the same King Tigranes the Great, 
tells us that he made the Republic of Rome tremble before the 
prowess of his arms. 

Unfortunately, the country became the prey of neighbouring 
nations. Persians, Greeks, Romans, Tartars, each and all over- 
ran the country. All by turns have contended for mastery. 

Three dynasties maintained power in Armenia proper. 

1 There is a controversy on the origin of the word "Armenia." Some also 
attribute it to Arameen, which signifies High Land in Armenian. But it is 
most likely that the country has been called after Aram, one of our greatest 
kings, and who achieved fame among his neighbours. Semiramis the great 
Assyrian queen waged war against Ara, the son of Aram, the brave and hand- 
some Armenian chief, in consequence of his stern determination to resist the 
offers of the" mighty Assyrian sovereign. (Read Sarchedon, by G. T. Whyte- 
Melville. Ward, Lock, & Co., Salisbury Square, E.C.) 

2 The first dynasty begins with Haig, 2540 B.C., and ends on or about 150 
B.C. The second, or Arsacidian dynasty, under which Armenia reached the 
height of its glory, from 150 B.C. to 428 A.D.. The third, or Pagradounian 
dynasty, closes in the year 1080 A. n. 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question. 3 

In the early part of the eleventh century, after the fall of the 
Pagradounian Dynasty, flying before the Mongolian invader, 
thousands of Armenians left the seat, of their sires to take refuge 
in the inaccessible fastnesses of the Taurus, and transformed 
Cilicia into an Armenian Kingdom under the Rupenian Dynasty, 
whose last King, Leo VI., 1 after a heroic struggle with Egyptian 
invaders, was captured in 1375, from which dates the extinction of 
the Armenians as an independent nation. 

The Cilician Kingdom lasted three centuries ; and this really is 
marvellous, for the Armenians had to contend not only with 
Moslem foes, but with the Byzantine Greeks, whom they defeated 
and worsted on more than one occasion. While in Cilicia the 
Armenians rendered eminent service to the cause of Christendom 
and civilisation by helping the Crusaders in their wars against 
the Saracens. The claim of the Armenian people as a Christian 
people upon the support of Christian Europe may be said to date 
from the time of the Crusades. 

The Armenians have been the first people who have abandoned 
their former religion, which was that of the Magi, to embrace 
Christianity. In fact, the introduction of Christianity among 
them was coeval with Jesus Christ, or soon after. " Thaddeus, one 
of the seventy, was sent to Edessa, then the capital of Armenia 
(for the capital of Armenia has often changed), to instruct the 
King Abkar in the new faith, which he did. He baptized him 
and the citizens of that metropolis. 

The seeds of Christianity were consequently sown ; but it was 
not until some three centuries later, when appeared Gregory of 
Caesarea, that a revival of the faith Avas created by him. Hence 
the appellation given to him by the Armenians of " Gregory the 
Illuminator." 

It is, in truth, this form of national Christian Church that has 
so far kept the Armenians together. 1 

There are about 200,000 Armenians belonging to the Romish 
Church, and 60,000 to the Protestant, out of 6,000,000 of 
Armenians. 2 But the spirit of nationality is deeply rooted in 
them all. 3 

1 Leo died at Paris on the 29th November 1393. His remains are interred 
at St. Denis, which has become a place of pilgrimage for the Armenians. 
There the Armenians of Paris resort every Easter, and appropriate speeches 
are delivered on the tomb of the last Armenian king. 

2 V Armenie, by J. Broussali {Revue Francaise, June 1886). 

3 The Spiritual Supreme Head of the Gregorian Armenians is the 



4 National Life and Thought. 

The Armenians have all the good qualities to make them the 
champions of civilisation and progress in Asia Minor. There is, 
indeed, no other Asiatic race so capable of appreciating the 
civilisation of Europe, or so worthy of European support and 
sympathy. 

And as to their qualities and virtues, they can appeal to an 
areopagus of historians, poets, statesmen, travellers. 

Gibbon's Roman Empire bears testimony to the mercantile 
genius, religious fervency, and valour and prowess of the 
Armenians in the third and fourth centuries. 

" It is difficult," says Byron, " to trace in the annals of a nation 
less crime than in the Armenian, whose virtues are those of peace, 
and whose vices the outcome of oppression." 

An exampled oppression — " The helpless nation," says Gibbon, 
"has seldom been permitted to enjoy the tranquillity of servitude. 
From the earliest period to the present hour Armenia has been 
the theatre of war. Under the rod of oppression the zeal of the 
Armenians is fervent and intrepid ; they have often preferred the 
crown of martyrdom to the white turban of Mahomet." 

Lamartine styles the Armenians the Swiss, while Dulaurier 
gives them the appellation of the Dutch of the East. Lord 
Carnarvon, in a speech in the House of Lords, equalled them to 
the Greeks in intellectual power. Mr. James Bryce, in his 
Transcaucasia and Ararat, tells that "when there meets you a 
keener or more restless glance, you may be sure that it comes 
from an Armenian eye." 

They have given statesmen and men of action to famous 
nations. Nubar Pacha, the brilliant Egyptian Minister ; Melikoff, 
the Russian General who captured Kars, are there to bear one 
out. Some 30,000 Armenians at Zeythoun, in Cilicia, the repre- 
sentatives of those who formed the Cilician Kingdom, have, to a 
score of years ago, maintained their independence. 

Catholicos of Echtmiadzin, whose seat is in Russian Armenia, near Erivan. 
The patriarch of Constantinople exercises spiritual and some sort of temporal 
power over the Gregorian Armenians of Turkey. He is assisted by a civil and 
ecclesiastical council, and is responsible to an "assembly of representatives," 
in virtue of a Charter granted by the Porte in 1862, in amplification of the 
privileges and rights conferred by Sultan Mahommed II., on the first Armenian 
Patriarchate he instituted in Constantinople after the capture of that capital. 
The powers of the said body end where those of the state begin. It has a 
voice in the management and control of the educational and ecclesiastical 
affairs of the community ; but it cannot remedy any of the evils under which 
the Armenians are now groaning. 






The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question. 5 

Armenian literature is rich and varied, and history, philosophy, 
and poetry are amply represented. 

Armenia is now partitioned among three Powers : Russia, 
Turkey, and Persia. Her limits cannot be easily defined, and 
have undergone many a change in the course of her historical 
vicissitudes. Armenia in older days extended from the Caucasus 
to Mesopotamia, and to Western Asia Minor, and occupied an 
area of about 150,000 square miles. The country is of a moun- 
tainous character. Its plains are high, but fertile, yielding corn 
of the finest quality, and in abundance ; as also tobacco, flax, rice, 
and cotton ; its pasture lands sustain breeds of horses ; its valleys 
produce the grape, the apple, and other fruits ; trees such as the 
poplar, oak, olive, carob, and fig thrive. 

Armenia is the source of several important rivers, such as 
the Euphrates, which springs from the mountains of Erzeroum 
(Garin), and flows into the Persian Gulf, after joining the Tigris 
below Bagdad; the Tigris, the second river of Armenia, falls into 
the Persian Gulf; the Araxes, after the Armenian King Aramays 
(the Gihon of the ancients), which runs into the Caspian Sea ; 
and the Tchorouk, or the Phison of the Scriptures, which takes 
its source near the B-aibourt mountains, and flows into the Black 
Sea. Where the territories of Persia, Turkey, and Russia meet in 
North-east Armenia, Ararat (the Massis of the Armenians, after 
Amassia, the grand-nephew of Hai'g, and upon which tradition 
says that the Ark of Noah rested), with its summit covered in 
perpetual snow, rises above the plain at its base, to the height of 
14,320 feet. 

Again, the Taurus and Ante-Taurus chain cover an extensive 
area, from Armenia proper to the South-western Armenia (Cilicia). 

These mountain chains contain mines of rock-salt, nitre, 
naphtha, sulphur, iron, and copper, as also lead, silver, and even 
gold, zinc, and other metals. The traces, however, of the gold- 
mines have now been lost, although these were known to exist in 
olden times. 

The zoological kingdom of the country is also extremely rich. 
On the Erzeroum plateau more than 170 kinds of wild birds are 
known to exist. The crane and stork are the favourite birds of 
the Armenians, and frequently form the subject of their folk- 
poesy. Wild animals abound, and the bear, lynx, wolf, hyena, 
leopard, tiger, buffalo, bull, wild ass and wild sheep, and others 
cover that immense country. The domestic animals, the sheep, 
of which more than a million are exported ; the horses and camel, 



6 Natio7ial Life and Thought. 

while the rivers and the lakes Van, Ourmiah, and Sevan (three 
principal lakes of Armenia, situate in Turkish, Persian, and 
Russian Armenia respectively) abound in multifarious fishes of 
various colours. 

The climate of Armenia is essentially cold. Though in the 
same parallel of latitude as Greece, Italy, and Spain, and parts of 
Asia-Minor, nevertheless the severity of her winter is even greater 
than that of the north of France and that of Germany. 

The country was rich in the distant past in large and important 
cities, such as Ani, the ruins of which attest its ancient splendour 
and magnificence, Armavir on the Araxes, Vagharshabad, and 
Digranakuerd. Van, Erzeroum, were then, as they now are, 
important centres. 

The Armenian Question. — Armenia is, as above stated, divided 
among Russia, Persia, and Turkey. In the beginning of the 
seventeenth century she was partitioned between Persia and 
Turkey. 

Towards the end of the eighteenth century the province of 
Karabag, a fertile and mountainous country, peopled by 200,000 
Armenians and 100,000 Tartars and Persians, and governed by 
Armenian chiefs, under the nominal domination of Persia, was 
conquered by Russia, and thus ever since the beginning of this 
century Armenia is ruled by three Powers. Russia subsequently, 
in 1828 and in 1829, extended her conquests in Persian and 
Turkish Armenia. The Treaty of Turkmen-Tcha'i of 5th March 
1828 delimitated the Russo-Persian frontiers, while the Berlin 
Treaty of 1878 fixed those of Turkey and Russia in Asia Minor. 

The Armenian grievances, or the Armenian Question, became 
one of immediate international concern ever since the insertion of 
a special Clause in the Berlin Treaty of 1878 in favour of the 
Armenians occupying the provinces of Van, Erzeroum, Diarbekir, 
Kharpoot, and Dersim, in Turkish Armenia, and numbering 
about two millions. The Clause referred to, which is but a 
modified form of Article 16 of the Treaty of San Stefano, runs thus : 
"The Sublime Pcrte undertakes to carry out, without further 
delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local require- 
ments in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians, and to 
guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It 
will periodically make known the steps taken to this effect to the 
Powers, who will superintend their application." This Clause, 
coupled with Article 62 of the same instrument, place the civil and 
religious liberties of the Armenian people under the express 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question. 7 

guarantee of the International Law, and under the supervision and 
control of the Powers, parties to the Treaty. Article 62 enacts 
that "The Sublime Porte having expressed its intention of main- 
taining the principle of religious liberty, and giving it the widest 
scope, the contracting parties take note of this spontaneous 
declaration. In no part of the Ottoman Empire shall difference 
of religion be alleged against any person as a ground for exclusion 
from or incapacity for the discharge of civil and political rights, 
and admission to public functions. All persons shall be admitted 
without distinction to give evidence before the tribunals. The 
freedom and exercise of all forms of worship are assured to all." 

The raison d'etre of Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty may be 
explained in a few matter-of-fact sentences thus classified : — - 

I. The absence of Civil and Political Equality. 

II. The non-admission or non-appreciation of Armenian evi- 
dence in the Turkish Courts of Justice (in cases where the 
Armenian is the wronged party and the Moslem the delinquent). 

III. The systematic pillage and destruction of Armenian 
villages ; the sacking of convents ; the perpetration of all kinds of 
crimes and oppressive acts by new-imported Circassians, and 
especially by the Kurds — not unfrequently also by the police and 
by the local officials. 

IV. The venality of justice. 

V. The systematic efforts to crush and ruin the peasant classes 
(1) by heavy and arbitrary taxes, and (2) by dispossessing them of 
their holdings. 

These grievances exist down to the present day as they did 
when the Berlin Treaty was signed. It would occupy too much 
space to explain in detail the evils complained of, and bring out 
minutely the consequences resulting therefrom. I shall prin- 
cipally deal with Grievance II. 

The positive prescriptions of Imperial Hatts and Imperial 
Firmans issued from time to time by reigning sovereigns of 
Turkey, ever since the reign of Sultan Abdul-Medjid, to their 
Christian subjects promising them liberty of conscience, and 
equality before the law, equality of taxation, and assurances of 
reform, are mere idle words, Whatever the letter of the law 
may say, the testimony of the Christian is not received, or if 
received, not appreciated, with what result it will be easy to 
understand. The attention of the civilised world has been lately 
absorbed by the prevalence of slave trade in the Dark Continent, 
and international conferences and a congress held to devise the 



8 National Life and Thought. 

most efficacious means for the suppression of that immoral traffic. 
Now in Armenia — and, I may add, in Turkey in general — slavery 
exists and is rampant in one of its worst forms, and is connived at 
and supported by the Moslem judges. The polygamous Kurdish 
or Turkish Beys and Aghas, whose hitherto regular supply of 
Circassian girls from the Caucasus has been cut off from them 
since the annexation of the province by Russia, have recourse 
now to a bold system of rape. They swoop down upon an 
Armenian village, with their armed acolytes, and carry off to their 
harems, by main force, as many good-looking girls and women as 
they can lay hands on. This is permitted to them; and the 
modus operandi by which the abduction of Armenian girls is 
rendered legal by the Moslem judges may be summed up as 
follows : — When the relatives present themselves in court to claim 
the abducted victim, the ravishers are ready with a brace of 
Moslem witnesses (a hundred could be produced if wanted), who 
declare on oath that the kidnapped woman pronounced in their 
presence the regular formula of the Moslem faith : " There is no 
God but God, and Mahomed is His Prophet," Christian evidence 
to the contrary being invariably rejected. 

The judge thereupon dismisses the case, on the ground that the 
stolen and ravished girl has by that profession abjured her former 
faith and embraced Mohammedanism. And the verdict of these 
upright judges is not to be set aside. The victims protest ; but 
their protestations avail them nothing. They invoke in vain the 
positive prescriptions of the Imperial Hatts, and the distinct 
stipulations of solemn treaties, promising liberty of conscience and 
equality before the law. The Turkish Solon is not to be moved. 
His invariable reply is, that the Koran — source of all human and 
Divine legislation — is the supreme law of the land, and it would 
be blasphemy to admit or suppose that any subsequent enact- 
ments could in any way have modified its sacred teachings. 

Hundreds of Armenian girls are thus lost to their homes and 
imprisoned in Turkish harems ; they are never set free, and if one 
ever succeeds in escaping, the chances are ten to one that sooner 
or later she will be murdered. 1 

Again, in consequence of the non-appreciation of Christian 



1 A custom prevails in Turkey whereby a Moslem is exempted from mili- 
tary service if he elopes with a Christian girl and keeps her in his harem for 
a time long enough to warrant the presumption that she embraced Moham- 
medanism. 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question, g 

evidence, Mahometans commit all sorts of crimes and misdeeds 
on the Christian population, who cannot obtain justice, through 
their evidence being ignored and contemned, and Mahometans 
seldom coming forward to give evidence against a coreligionist. 
Moreover, through the non-admission of Christian testimony, 
Mahometans, Turks or Kurds, or Circassians, find the most 
efficacious means to dispossess the Armenians from the lands they 
inherited ab antiquo. Kurds or Circassians settle or encamp in 
the vicinity of Armenian villages, and cultivate the lands belong- 
ing to Armenians. Should a dispute arise, a number of Moslem 
witnesses are produced in Court, who testify to the lands having 
been owned by the Kurds from time immemorial. Armenian 
evidence to the contrary is seldom accepted. And thus, under 
the segis of the law, the Armenians are gradually dispossessed of 
lands they inherited from their forefathers for the benefit of 
predatory and wild tribes. The Kurds were known in the time of 
Xenophon, who pelted his army with stones in the famous retreat. 
They have not crystallised into a " nation " ever since. They 
possess no literature and no learning, and most have no fixed 
abode. They usually have recourse to Armenian or Persian 
alphabets whenever they wish to express their thoughts in writing. 
In olden times they inhabited the country south of the province of 
Van, in the Hekkeari district, in close proximity to the present 
Nestorians. The policy of the Sublime Porte, especially since the 
Crimean War, has been to gradually replace the historic, peaceful, 
and laborious Armenian by the predatory Kurdish element, with 
a view, on the one hand, to radically stamping out the "Armenian 
Question ; " and, on the other, in the event of a war with Russia, 
to utilise the Kurds in arresting the Muscovite legions from a fur- 
ther advance in Asia Minor. As soldiers the Kurds are useless, 
and they amply proved it during the last Turko-Russian War. 
They are not a brave people, nor have they any high or manly 
qualities. Their robberies, their crimes, and their misdeeds are 
dastardly affairs. They seldom attack armed travellers, except in 
very superior numbers. They assault more commonly peaceful 
caravans, or defenceless villages. Feuds and quarrels are frequent 
among them. Mutual confidence is almost unknown. All the 
villages from Erzeroum to Bitlis, and from Van to Salmaste, in 
Persia, are more or less exposed to Kurdish raids and plunder. 
Thus it will be seen that the Kurds a are, on the one hand, the 



1 Through the continual usurpation of the lands the Kurds have elevated 



io National Life and Thought. 

usurpers of the lands of the Armenians, with the connivance of the 
Turkish Government ; and, on the other, they are brigands, and 
high-robbers and raiders, well armed and equipped with modern 
rifles, and left unrestrained to commit all sorts of excesses on 
defenceless populations. 

" The Kurds," says Mr. C. Wilkinson, who visited Armenia 
and Asia Minor about a hundred years ago, and whose evidence 
testifies that Armenia is to-day what she then was ; " the Kurds," 1 
says the traveller, "are constantly on the watch for an opportunity 
of plundering the caravans. If a good guard is not kept in the 
tents, they come privately and pull out bales of goods with hooks, 
without being perceived; and if the bales are fastened together 
with cords, they are seldom without a good razor to cut them. As 
caravans generally set out before daybreak, the rogues mix with 
the drivers, and turn out of the way a few miles laden with goods, 
which they easily carry off in the dark ; and they seldom choose 
the worst, for they know the bales of silks as well as the owners. 
These people own no masters, and the Turks never punish them, 
even when they are taken up for murder and robbery." 

And Mr. Wilkinson's assertions are true to the present day. 
The case of the notorious Kurdish chief, Moussa Bey, is an illus- 
tration of what has been said above as to the futility of Turkish 
promises to mete out justice to Christians where they are wronged 
by a Mahometan ; it shows that, notwithstanding all the pompous 
Imperial enactments, Christian evidence is still either not 
admitted or not appreciated. It shows, moreover, the tacit, if 
not overt, encouragement given by the " Authorities " in Turkey 
to the Kurds to pillage, burn, and slaughter the Armenians. 
Who is Moussa Bey, whose name has now become almost a 
" household " word in Europe ? This is what an impartial writer, 
during the troubled times of the Turko-Russian war, said of 
Moussa Bey, on whom the Turks have bestowed the palm of 
martyrdom:—" Mr. C. B. Norman, Correspondent of The Times at 
the seat of war in Armenia in 1877, in his Avork entitled ' Armenia 
and the Campaign of 1877,' says : .' In the neighbourhood of 
Moosh, one Moussa Bey, a son of Mirza Bey, a Kurd from Wear 

themselves, in some districts, in Bitlis in particular, to the position of feudal 
chiefs, and make the Armenians pay them tribute. Should the Armenian 
refuse to pay, the Kurd ravages and pillages his village.— Dr. Grigor, Artzruni, 
editor of the Mschag (Tiflis). 

1 " A Tour through Asia Minor and the Greek Islands." By C. Wilkinson. 
London: Printed by Darton & Harvey, Gracechurch Street. 1806. 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question, n 

Van, has been ravaging the country at the head of a small body 
of cavalry. The villages of Moolah Akjam, Hadogan, and 
Kharkin, having been first pillaged, were set on fire. At Ardork 
he extracted ^60, and at Ingrakam ^40 from the head men of 
the village, under pretence of sparing them from destruction, and 
straightway set the places on fire. He then proceeded to a 
Mussulman village called Norashen, and, hearing that an 
Armenian merchant of Bitlis was passing through, robbed him of 
all his goods, to the value of 30,000 piastres, and then ordered his 
men to murder him. At Khartz this monster entered the house 
of the Armenian priest, who had lately brought his bride to his 
father's home. Binding the old man and his son together with 
cords, this inhuman scoundrel ravished the poor girl before their 
eyes, and then gave orders for the murder of the three. I can 
write no more. A bare recital of the horrors committed by these 
demons is sufficient to call for their condign punishment. The 
subject is too painful to need any colouring, were my feeble pen 
enabled to give it.' " 

Moussa Bey was, these crimes notwithstanding, appointed a 
Mudir, or a petty governor, in one of the districts of Moosh. He 
subsequently, three years ago, perpetrated other crimes of an 
equally atrocious nature, setting fire to and destroying barns, 
extracting money from inoffensive peasants, killing some and 
wounding others, not sparing American missionaries. While, in 
the spring of 1889, he committed a series of outrages, which the 
readers will find recorded in the Blue Book, No. i, of 1889 
(Turkey). They may be summed up thus : He carried off 
women, massacred villagers, seized a notable, and flung him on 
faggots, and burned him alive in presence of his followers. An 
outcry was raised. The cry of the suffering Armenians, of 
outraged women, of desperate humanity, the cry of desolation and 
ruin reached the ears of Europe. Public opinion was agitated, 
and the Turks saw that something had to be done. Moussa 
was " invited " to proceed to Constantinople, not as a criminal, 
but as an honoured guest. He is first conducted to Bitlis in 
triumph, escorted by the head of the Moslem religious com- 
munity, and a train of functionaries, soldiers, zaptielers, softas, 
and cavaliers. On leaving Erzeroum, Moussa is escorted for 
some miles by the governor of the province and a strong body 
of cavalry. At Constantinople the ceremony is still more formal ; 
and as soon as the steamer conveying the truculent brigand is 
signalled, two generals proceed on board to receive him. In the 



12 National Life and Thought. 

Turkish metropolis he is comfortably quartered, surrounded with 
servants and attendants, and frequently entertained and feasted by 
friends in authority. More than forty witnesses and complainants 
travelled all the way from Armenia to Constantinople to give 
evidence, and to substantiate the charges preferred against 
him. The trial of three of the principal counts was concluded 
on 2nd December last, and the hearing of the other adjourned 
sine die. Moussa was acquitted by a majority of Mussulmen 
judges, notwithstanding most direct and conclusive evidence. 
Those who saw the trial described it as a virtual farce all through. 
The Public Prosecutor, who represents the State and the Law, 
and whose duty it is to protect the suffering people, bullied 
the witnesses, and overtly acted as a counsel for Moussa Bey. 
"Suffice it to say," writes Sir William White, Her Britannic 
Majesty's Ambassador at Constantinople to the Marquis of 
Salisbury {vide Blue Book, Turkey No. i, 1890, page 100), " that 
the position taken up by the Public Prosecutor savoured rather of 
that of a lawyer for the defence than of a prosecutor on behalf of 
the Government, and it is generally considered unprecedented in 
the judicial annals of this country." Thus ended one of the most 
scandalous trials on record. The case of Moussa Bey is but an 
instance, a specimen, and serves to illustrate how justice is 
prostituted in Turkey, even in her very metropolis, at the very 
gates of Europe. 

After the scandalous proceedings in connection with this now 
celebrated trial, the following report from Van, which gives a 
graphic description of the present condition of the country, 
explains itself: " Every Armenian village is compelled, notwith- 
standing its extreme poverty, to provide food almost daily for the 
army of tax-gathering officials, who on their part treat the in- 
habitants with absolute inhumanity. The peasant, reduced now 
to the last extremity, must either sell his oxen and plough, his 
house and fields, and clear out ; or go to distant provinces in 
quest of work, with no prospect of returning ; or emigrate : or 
start out and beg from door to door. Thanks to this policy, many 
of the southern and eastern districts of Vasbouragan (Province of 
Van) are nearly depopulated of their Christian element, whose 
place has been taken by Kurds, Turks, Yezidis, &c. Even the 
educational expenses of the Turks are provided out of the taxes 
paid by the Armenians. As for the Kurd, he is under no restraint 
of law, under no burden of taxes, and has no regular military 
service to undergo. A chartered outlaw, he devastates, plunders, 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question. 13 

burns, and kills ; and no man calls him to account. Robberies 
and outrages are committed without number; but the Govern- 
ment neither sees nor hears, for its own officials are too often the 
perpetrators. Forced marriages, forced conversions to Moham- 
medanism are common, always and everywhere. In a word, civil 
rights, justice, order, and tranquillity have, as it were, bidden their 
last farewell, and departed from the land of the Armenian subjects 
of Turkey. 

" Corruption reigns supreme among the officials without dis- 
tinction, from the highest to the lowest. It has become a law. 
Every official, even the Governor himself, obtains his office from 
the Central Government by bribery, and by this alone; and 
throughout all the official world plunder is the great business of 
life. In all the courts of law, cases are kept pending until the 
litigants have been sucked dry; and as often as not an unjust 
judgment is given in favour of the suitor who has lumped down 
the biggest bribe. But woe to the non-suited should he venture 
to question the judge's decision ! Imprisonment for life, or, at 
the least, perpetual exile, is apt to be his answer. It is absolutely 
forbidden to draw up public memorials. The Press is gagged, till 
there is nothing left for it to print but flatteries of the persons by 
whom the gags have been applied. Numerous houses are every- 
where searched on the flimsiest and most impudent pretences. 
Private detractors and calumniators are rewarded with honours 
and offices. Young men are exiled for indefinite periods ; and 
their defenceless and helpless families are left to shift as they may. 
The prisons are filled with Armenians (many of whom clergymen) 
who have been flung there without rhyme or reason." 

No account of the present condition of Armenia would be 
complete without a comprehensive statement on the numerous 
irregularities committed and the vexatious measures adopted by 
the fiscal officials in connection with the collection and assess- 
ment of taxes. The Armenian Christian subjects of the Sultan 
are exempted from military service in consideration of a poll-tax, 
named bedelaskerie (military exemption tax), the amount of which 
is not properly and equitably assessed. Thus the aforesaid tax, 
which applies only to persons fit for service, is demanded from the 
relatives of people who are dead, who have emigrated, or who are 
infirm. In many cases the tax is levied on newly-born persons 
and on old men. Again, with respect to the fixed taxes levied 
upon property (emlak) and upon professions (temettu), the local 
officials carry on unjust assessments, without regard to the value 



14 National Life and Thought. 

of the property, to its resources, or to the capabilities and earnings 
of the person assessed for the " professions " tax. Moreover, the 
assessing officials, contrary to imperial orders, undervalue the 
properties owned by Mahometans. Thus the property tax fails 
more heavily upon Christians than upon Mahometans. Cases 
can be quoted where lands belonging to Armenians have been 
registered for taxation at ten times their real actual value. The 
temettu tax (tax on professions), which should by law be levied on 
artisans and shopkeepers, is arbitrarily extended to farmers, and 
even to women who exercise no such profession. The tax- 
gatherers in collecting taxes infringe the existing laws of the 
empire by seizing and selling the most necessary household goods, 
trade implements, wearing apparel, and bedding of the debtor. 
They invariably, when the taxpayer is not able to satisfy the State, 
seize objects indispensable for the proper working of any immov- 
able property, such as animals attached to cultivation, agricultural 
implements, seed corn, etc. The proprietor, entirely stripped of 
all movable capital, has nothing remaining but the bare land, 
denuded of those accessories without which it can yield nothing. 
Tithe farming, which does not exist in theory since the promulga- 
tion of the Hatts Houmayoun of 1856, is still in full force in the 
Armenian provinces. It may be remembered that one of the 
principal causes which led to the Herzegovinian insurrection was 
due to the excesses of the tithe farmers in the Nevesinje district. 
The tithe farmers in the Armenian provinces are generally the 
beys or local functionaries, who, in order to avoid an overt breach 
of the law, rent the tithes through their sons, relatives, or servants. 
The tithes of a given province are farmed out to the highest 
bidder. The farmers, in collusion with the governor of the 
province, never hesitate to bid an elevated price. They calculate 
the price they are willing to pay on the basis of more than forty per 
cent, minimum profit for themselves. They have nothing to fear 
in the way of incurring losses; for where the value of tithe is 
affected by a sudden fall in the produce markets, the farmers 
(multezims) are allowed carte blanche to recoup themselves by 
vexatious exactions, or by over-estimating the quantity of the 
produce. The tithe farmers compel the peasants to pay in specie, 
although the tithe is due in kind. Should the cultivator display 
reluctance to pay the tithe in money in lieu of in kind, the 
multezim refuses to assess his crops, thus exposing the agricul- 
turist to severe losses, for until the tithe is assessed he is not 
allowed to remove his produce, which stands out in the open air, 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question. 15 

exposed to rain, hail, etc. The unfortunate peasant in despair 
appeals to the tithe farmer, who assesses the crops after payment 
of double the amount he demanded before. Even the produce 
of gardens attached to dwellings, and used for home consumption, 
is subjected to taxation, contrary to the existing laws of the 
Empire. Where the tithe is paid in kind, the producer is bound 
to. deliver it. The peasants wait day after day at the doors of the 
Government stores, in order that their crops may be measured 
and stored. It is, moreover, a subject of complaint that the 
multezims do not assess the crops at harvest time, often on 
account of the farming out of the tithes being delayed until that 
season, although the law prescribes that they should be farmed 
out in spring. The crops are consequently left out in the fields 
and threshing-floors, where they not unfrequently decay and 
perish. But the multezims compel the peasants to pay for the 
damaged produce as if it were sound. Should the peasants 
refuse to pay, they are subjected to all kinds of vexation. They 
are dragged into the law courts, ill-treated, and imprisoned. The 
officials, in secret league with the tithe farmers, only serve the 
interests of the latter, and the poor agriculturist has to sacrifice 
all he possesses. The villager is bound to provide the multezim 
and his agents food and lodgings without remuneration for such 
time as they may choose to remain in the village. Not un- 
frequently the multezim beats the villager and sullies the honour 
of his wife and daughter. The tithe farmers commit multifarious 
other abuses, in the way of levying fresh taxes, assessing produce 
exempt from taxation, etc. The complaints are more grievous in 
districts where there are beys, agas, or Kurdish chiefs who have 
friends in authority to cover their systematic misdeeds. Under 
the aforesaid circumstances the peasant, unable to satisfy the 
State, has recourse to usurious loans, and he thus becomes the 
bondsman or serf of the usurer, who in time dispossesses him of 
all his goods, movable and immovable. He finally has to 
emigrate and seek a mode of living in distant climes. 

Such are the unredressed Armenian grievances twelve years 
after the passing of Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty. To remedy 
existing evils, it is not necessary to create an independent or 
autonomous Armenia, nor do the Armenians aim either at inde- 
pendence or at a distinct political existence. All they ask for are 
civil liberties and the establishment of institutions calculated to 
guarantee their personal safety, the security of their property, the 
honour of their wives and daughters, their rights, in fact, as men and 



1 6 National Life and Thought. 

civilised beings. The fulfilment of Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty, 
as explained by the Collective Note addressed to the Porte in 1880 
by the great Powers, will afford satisfaction, and will avert a crisis 
which is assuming menacing proportions. To check the incessant 
plunder and raids of the Kurds and Circassians, a gendarmerie 
recruited among the natives and commanded by native officers 
should be instituted. To eradicate corruption and venality, the 
present administration of Armenia, which is essentially Turkish, 
should be entrusted to the aborigines of the land, who constitute 
the vital forces of the country. The provinces of Van, Erzeroum, 
Diarbekir, Bitlis, Karpout, and Dersim, to be grouped in one 
province, with an Armenian governor at its head, sitting at 
Erzeroum, whose duties it will be to enforce the laws of the 
empire, and under whose command the established gendarmerie 
is to be placed for the maintenance of security and order. The 
desiderata of the Armenians may be therefore defined thus : 
An Armenian administration in Armenia. 

Cast a glance on the map and see where Armenia lies, and 
what a commanding position she holds, and what grave conse- 
quences would result through a Russian occupation of that 
country through its being allowed to seethe with discontent and 
disaffection. Indeed, a Russian occupation of Turkish Armenia 
means the practical supremacy of the whole of Western Asia. 
In the words of the author of Greater Britain, " Russia could 
reach Constantinople through Asia Minor, not so directly, but 
more surely and more safely than through Europe." 1 Military 
authorities testify to the Armenia plateau of Erzeroum being 
the key of Western Asia. Erzeroum, moreover, the capital of 
Turkish Armenia, is the point where converge the roads from 
the Caucasus and of those leading into Syria, Anatolia, and the 
Persian Gulf. If the Muscovite legions were allowed to become 
masters of such a commanding position, they would intercept the 
whole overland trade to India and Persia ; they may become a 
Mediterranean Power — with Alexandretta as their commercial port 
— and menace England in Cyprus and Egypt. The commercial 
interests of England in those regions would be placed in jeopardy 
by a further Russian advance ; for, to quote Lord Salisbury's 
own words, "the existing European trade which now passes 
from Trebizonde to Persia would be liable to be arrested at the 
pleasure of the Russian Government, by the arbitrary barriers of 

1 Present Position of European Politics (p. 161), by Sir Charles Dilke. 



The Armenians, Armenia, and the Armenian Question. \j 

their commercial system." Lord Salisbury's views are shared by 
Sir Charles Dilke, who adds: "There is one loss by a Russian 
occupation of the remainder of the Turkish dominions which no 
British Government would willingly face. It is the loss of trade. 
In Asiatic provinces acquired by Russia at the end of the last 
war, where there was formerly a considerable British trade, there 
is now none ; it- has been killed by protection duties." 

I have alluded to the natural wealth of the country, to its 
valuable mineral resources, which remain unexplored and 
dormant through want of security and safety. What an immense 
opening for the industrial and enterprising classes of England if 
they would devote their attention to my unhappy country instead 
of spending millions for the exploration of the Dark Continent, 
under guise of suppressing slave trade ! 

I have endeavoured to bring out the past, the brilliant past, of 
the Armenians, their services to civilisation and Christendom, 
their rights, and how these rights are trampled under foot, and 
how the distinct stipulations of treaties have remained a dead 
letter. I have endeavoured, moreover, to show of what interest 
it is to England — an interest commercial, strategical, and political 
— to bring about the solution of the long-pending Armenian 
Question. I now make a solemn appeal, on behalf of outraged 
humanity, to the people of this country, and ask them to use 
their legitimate influence for the amelioration of the condition 
of a suffering nation, groaning under a most odious tyranny. I 
may here remind England's responsibilities. Subsequent to the 
last Turko-Russian War, Russia reserved to herself, in the 16th 
Article of the Treaty of San Stefano, the sole Protectorate of the 
Armenians. England refused to admit such a stipulation ; and a 
Convention was signed between England and Russia, on May 
30, 1878, wherein it was agreed that the Protectorate should be 
jointly shared by the two contracting states. On the 4th June of 
the same year England signed with Turkey the so-called Cyprus 
Convention, which increased her responsibilities, for under that 
instrument she actually guaranteed the introduction of reforms in 
Armenia. In fact, by the Cyprus Convention, England is co- 
responsible with Turkey for the effective amelioration of Armenia, 
and she shares with that country the right of exercising a consti- 
tutional prerogative in Asia Minor. 

It is now high time that something should be done by this 
nation, which has been rightly styled the protector of the weak 
and oppressed, in the interests of humanity and justice, to say 



1 8 National Life and Thought. 

nothing of interests already dwelt upon other than of pure senti- 
ment ; and it would thereby be echoing and confirming the words 
of a great orator, John Bright, who, in a speech delivered' in 
Birmingham prior to the Turko-Russian hostilities, said of the 
people of Great Britain that the lover of freedom always looks to 
them; the oppressed everywhere turn their eyes to ask for 
sympathy, and wish for help from them ; they feel that they make 
this upon them — a free people. They do not deny that claim, 
but they freely acknowledge it. 

Armenians have a claim upon England, Scotland, and Ireland, 
and they are confident of the result. 



II. 

A USTRIA. 

DR. S. SCHIDROWITZ. 

A FEW weeks ago I was reading in the newspapers a notice 
to the effect that the ballet girls of Vienna are the 
handsomest and the best performers in any theatre in Europe. 
This is almost the only favourable notice about Austria which I 
have seen in an English newspaper for many a year ; and I certainly 
would not have ventured to mention it, if it had not struck me as 
a very peculiar thing that such a small matter should be almost 
the only one mentioned in a great London paper. But it is so. 
Austria, though a very great country in Europe, is very little known 
in England, much less known than many countries in Africa and 
Asia, and perhaps the cause of it is this. One of the greatest and 
most illustrious British statesmen said publicly a few years ago, 
" Show me a spot on earth where Austria has done any good." 
Of course, such a statement from the lips of one of the greatest 
Englishmen does perhaps prejudice peoples' minds ; and editors, 
who know how to take their cue, do not occupy themselves or 
their readers very much with a country of which such a great 
statesman made such a disparaging remark. Another very great 
Englishman, an historian, in all his writings has hardly a good word 
to say about Austria, but always to the contrary ; in fact, he does not 
acknowledge Austria at all. He says there is an archduchy of 
Austria, and there is a house of Hapsburg, but he really does 
not" know Austria. Therefore the people who read his books 
cannot know anything about Austria either. 

It is a very remarkable circumstance that with some people 
history only commences very recently. With some, let us say, only 
in 1830 with the Reform Bill; with others perhaps only in 1867, 
or at some other period. If politics alone constituted the life, the 
principal mainsprings of the life of a people, then perhaps that 
great illustrious statesman and the historian might in some degree 
be right in saying that Austria, in comparison with a great many 



20 National Life and Thought. 

other nations of the world, would play a very small, perhaps a very 
poor, role amongst them ; but the political life, the political phases 
of a people, do not constitute the main interest of ninety-nine out 
of a hundred of the people of a nation. Election for Parliament 
only occurs on an average about once in every four or five years. 
Then, of course, the free citizen can vote, can do as he wishes in 
political matters, and so forth. But the ordinary pleasures and 
enjoyments of life, these are shared alike by every one, by the 
poorest as well as the richest, not once during five years, but every 
day, in the morning, at noon, and in the evening ; and in these 
enjoyments of life, in the civil enjoyments of life, in the 
enjoyments of all liberties, the people of Austria are certainly not 
behind any other people, and indeed in many respects perhaps 
they enjoy the pleasures of life much more than other nations. 

The rich in Austria are not so rich as the English rich, as 
" Milor," for instance, who is supposed on the Continent to be a 
kind of angelic being who discovers gold ; but, on the other hand, 
the poor in Austria are not so poor, not so destitute, not so badly 
off as they are here. I have never in my life seen in an Austrian 
newspaper a notice headed " Died of Starvation." The Austrian 
papers have no occasion to mention, as is unfortunately too often 
the case in other countries, that such and such a man or woman 
had been found dead of starvation. Furthermore, I have never 
seen or read in an Austrian paper (and more particularly as regards 
Vienna) of drunken women fighting in the streets. I have never 
seen in Austria drunkenness to the extent that one sees in other 
countries. I have never seen the disgraceful scenes that are to be 
witnessed daily in countries where, according to the newspapers, a 
much higher degree of civilisation exists than in poor benighted 
Austria. The Austrians, and especially the Viennese, have always 
had the reputation of being an easy-going, pleasure-loving people, 
so much so, that Schiller, one of the greatest of German poets, 
spoke of Vienna as the "lotus-eating town." The common 
belief in Germany and other countries was, that the people of 
Vienna did not care about anything but pleasure and enjoying life 
as much as they could. But this is a very great error. I have 
remarked before how it was stated of Austria, " Show me a 
place on earth where she has done any good." 

It may be true, that in the history of Austria, during, say, the last 
fifty or sixty years, nothing very great, or stirring, or interesting as 
compared with other nations has happened, but history does not 
commence either in 1830 or in 1848. But Vienna and Austria were 



Austria. 21 

for hundreds and hundreds of years the bulwark, the shield of Chris- 
tian Europe, of Christianity, against the inroads of the Mussulmans ; 
and to say that Austria has never done any good to the world, can 
certainly not be quite correct, when we consider that for many hun- 
dred years the people of Austria have had to shield and to protect, I 
may say, Europe from the attacks and inroads of the most savage 
enemies of civilisation which Europe and Christianity ever knew. 
The very name of Austria should show you the origin and scope 
of the history of that country. Austria means the Eastern country 
or Eastern Marches, a country which was specially created for the 
very purpose of protecting Germany and Western Europe against 
the inroads of the people who at the time of the exodus from 
Asia in the sixth century commenced to overrun that part of 
Europe. The Eastern Marches, which were created by the 
Emperor Charlemagne, were meant to be a barrier against Vandal- 
ism. And as at that time Christianity had only commenced to be 
propagated, and had no very deep hold in the country, the work 
which Charlemagne had laid for this people was certainly a very 
important and a very difficult one. 

And now let us see how this people who, according to the 
present common saying, did nothing but enjoy themselves in 
going to the theatre. Let us see how they proceeded. On the 
Danube there had been erected for a great many years a 
fortified castle ; but, as had happened in other countries, as 
had happened in England, the Roman legions, valorous though 
they were, could not stand against the native element, and 
they had to leave. On the very spot where Vienna to-day 
stands Celtic tribes were living. Therefore a thousand years 
ago Great Britain and Austria had a common nation — the Celts. 
Celtic tribes were living where Vienna now stands, in the same 
way that Celtic people inhabit the North of Scotland and Ireland. 
These tribes were also subject to the attacks of the nations which 
advanced from the south in the fifth and sixth centuries. But 
Vienna always managed to keep her own. We have authenticated 
statements how at that time, and especially later on in the eleventh 
century, the people of Vienna always defended themselves most 
valiantly against the inroads and the attacks of these people, but 
the real object and the real purpose for which Austria had been 
created commenced only in the twelfth century. 

Well, the people of Hungary came up, and at that time the German 
Emperor made the family of the Babenbergers Dukes of Austria, and . 
with the Babenbergers commenced the real origin of Austria and of 



22 National Life and Thought. 

Vienna. You will see at once what spirit these Babenbergers were 
of, when I tell you the very first thing the greatest of the Baben- 
bergers did — his name was Heinrich — was to lay the foundation 
of the noblest church in Europe — the Stephen's Kirche. He knew 
that if he wished to make Vienna a town of the future, one which 
would last and not be ruined by barbarous invaders, he would 
have to invoke the help of the Church, and he did that by laying 
the foundation stone of the Stephen's Kirche. It is certainly one 
of the finest domes in Europe, if not in the world. It took over 
two hundred years to finish this most wonderful church dome, 
and now this very dome is considered by all Austria, and especi- 
ally by the Viennese, as the very centre of their life. 

Seven hundred years had passed, when a very great danger 
threatened the whole of Europe. It was at the time when the 
Turks under Sultan " Solyman the Magnificent " were in the 
height of their fame. Sultan Solyman had the idea that the Turkish 
Empire and the Mohammedan religion should become not only the 
principal, but the only power and the only religion in the world. 
He marshalled a very great army. At that time two hundred and 
fifty thousand men meant a much larger army than is to-day 
represented by two millions. He advanced right up to the walls of 
Vienna, and there again the inhabitants of that " pleasure-loving " 
capital for months and months were besieged, and eventually 
succeeded by their own efforts in beating back the greatest 
warrior of the time, and drove him back to Turkey, thus saving 
not only Austria, but Germany, and perhaps the whole of Europe, 
from the domination of the Turks, a domination which had 
lasted many centuries in Asia. This was in 1529. 

In 1683 tne same thing happened again. Again a Turkish 
Emperor, advised, I must say, by the Most Christian King of France, 
Louis XIV., sent his Generals with an army still larger than the 
previous one, and again laid siege to Vienna. Not one finger was 
raised for several months to succour the besieged Viennese. Once 
more the citizens of that pleasure-loving town succeeded almost alone 
to hold the Turks at bay, until afterwards the Duke of Lothringen 
and the King of Poland came to their rescue. Thus, again, it was 
Vienna which saved the whole country from the domination of 
the Turks, and who is it who does not know what the domination of 
the Turks in a Christian country means ? I have mentioned these 
few examples only to show that the great reproach " that there is 
not a spot on earth where Austria has done good " is not quite 
correct. 



Austria. 23 

In early times, at all events, in 1529 and 1683, Austria 
and the capital of Austria had certainly done Europe and the 
world a service which hardly any other town or any other nation 
has done for the continent of Europe. And' yet it is unfortunately 
true that in some respects, especially as far as politics are 
concerned, Austria (I may not say is) has been very much 
backward in comparison with other nations. But other countries, 
other nations, have also had such periods — I will not say which 
countries. I will merely say that the development of political 
liberty, of all political rights, general suffrage and so forth, have 
also in other countries not always been the same, only that in 
Austria unfortunately the period of darkness has been much 
longer, and for the following reasons. 

The House of Hapsburg had, in the sixteenth century particularly, 
a great many enemies, who not only fought against certain princes, 
but against the house, against the dynasty itself. Now, unfortun- 
ately, the reigning family at that time called in the help of a power 
which five hundred years ago had done very much to keep the 
people in spiritual bondage. They called in the help of the 
Jesuits, and to that order to the greatest extent is due the dark- 
ness which reigned during two hundred years and more in 
Austria. 

The University of Vienna, which was founded in 1365, was at 
one time the greatest, or one of the greatest, of Universities, and 
quite on a level with the great Universities of Paris and Bologna. 
But since the sixteenth century, and especially since the Thirty Years' 
War, which did so much misfortune and harm to the centre of 
Europe, the University of Vienna, as well as all the lower educa- 
tional establishments in Vienna and Austria, came under the sway 
of this order, and with them there was only one principle — blind 
obedience and no progress. The Vienna University at that time,, 
instead of cultivating science ^nd art, as it has done for more than 
two hundred years, became nothing else than a mere machine for 
turning out employes of the State, and this course it was which 
brought Austria so low, and which induced everybody else in 
Europe to speak of Austria as the China of Europe, the most 
backward State in Europe. This state of affairs lasted very long. 
Politics were entirely unknown. There was nothing but blind 
obedience to the commands of superiors. Freethought, investi- 
gation, all that was ruthlessly repressed by those who conducted 
the education of the country from the highest university to the 
lowest school in the Empire. But this state of affairs does not 



24 National Life and Thought. 

exist now, and that is the great error which people at the present 
time appear to be labouring under. 

The history of old Austria closed entirely and completely so 
far as politics, culture, education, etc., is concerned, with the year 
1848. There is no more comparison between Austria, prior to 
1848 and the Austria of to-day, than there could be a comparison 
say between England under one of the Tudors, or even to come 
nearer to the present time, say during the reign of one of the Georges 
and the England of to-day. Indeed, I may say that the difference 
is even greater, because in England, after all, it was more a question 
of degree. In England certain liberties always did exist, but in 
Austria it was not so. Everything there had to commence. The 
history of Austria since 1848 is therefore the history of Modern 
Austria, and this history is certainly much more cheering and 
much more pleasant to speak about. 

You doubtless all know that Austria, unlike most of the other 
European nations, cannot be considered a nation in itself, i.e. 
there is no Austrian, as you can say there is the Frenchman, the 
Italian, the Englishman. Austria is a political idea, and consists of 
a number of different peoples, a number of smaller or larger 
nations, which are collected together under the sceptre of the 
Imperial Family of the Hapsburgs, and they form the Austrian 
Empire. But it is a very great error, on the other hand, to suppose 
that because there is no such thing as an Austria in itself, that 
therefore the Austrian Monarchy as such cannot form a political 
union just as firm as, let us say, France or Great Britain. You 
all know that in this kingdom of Great Britain the people are not 
all of the same nation ; they are not all of the same sect. We 
here have different component parts, but not to such a great 
degree as in Austria. There the foundation was formed on the 
creation of the archduchy of Austria, and they were Germans. 
Germans still form to a great degree the majority of the population 
of Austria, that is, when comparing each of its other nations 
separately. Austria and Germany have therefore always been in 
close accord, not only because the Hapsburgs were Emperors of 
the Holy Roman Empire, of German Nation, as it was called, but 
because the majority of the people in Austria are Germans, and 
because German culture, German science, were the same in 
both countries. 

You are doubtless aware that in consequence of political events 
the Austrian Empire, which was created in 1806, was divided in 
1867 into two parts — Austria Proper and Hungary. Of Hungary 



A ustria. 2 5 

I will not speak, only of Austria Proper, of the Austrian part of 
the Empire which is called Cis-Leithanian part of the Empire. 
Vienna, as you all know, is the capital of Austria, and a very 
pleasant and agreeable town Vienna is. As I said before, the 
reproach always was that the Viennese cared for nothing but their 
pleasures. But the inhabitants of Vienna showed in 1848 that 
they have within themselves the same fire, the same power to gain 
their liberties, as have been shown by other nations, say in 1688 in 
England, or in 1789 in France. One might say the whole system 
of Absolutism in Austria was overthrown by the Viennese them- 
selves. In imitation of the Revolution in Paris, the citizens of 
Vienna rose in their wrath and said, " We will not longer be slaves." 
The saying itself would have helped very little, but they added 
the act to their word. Prince Metternich, the leading minister, and 
the mainspring of Absolutism, had to run away, and all owing 
solely to the deeds of a few thousand Viennese citizens, aided by 
the students of the University, 

Vienna has not been much written about by Englishmen ; but 
when they do write about Vienna, one finds the most marvellous 
errors stated. I have read this very day, for instance, a statement 
that nobody who has been in Vienna has ever been invited to 
dinner by a Viennese. Further, that the Viennese are the most 
immoral people. Indeed, it would be impossible for me to go 
into the details of the statements which the writer makes. But I 
can assure you that the people of Vienna are no more immoral 
than the people of most other towns. For one thing, they are not 
hypocrites, nor are they hypercritical. They show themselves 
just as they are, and do not say, "We are the most virtuous people, 
all the rest are immoral, etc." As an example, I will tell you what 
happened to myself the other evening. I had a gentleman friend 
visiting me from Vienna. We went to one of the leading theatres 
of London. We sat in the stalls, and just in front of us also in 
the stalls were seated a gentleman and two ladies. I do not know 
that I could, if I attempted, describe the dress, or rather the 
undress, worn by those ladies. My friend from Vienna, however, 
remarked to me, "What, are we really sitting in a theatre in 
virtuous London where they do not even permit a song or dancing 
in the Music Halls?" Well, my friend was actually ashamed. 
Yes, he really blushed. He, the hardened sinner from "immoral " 
Vienna, actually got red in the face. Now, the English writer 
says the Viennese are immoral people, and here I have given you 
an example how the most "immoral" people may be shocked 



26 National Life and Thought. 

when they come to London. It is, I will not say all, nonsense, 
but it is exaggeration to say that the people of Vienna are 
immoral. They have to work hard to make a living, and they do 
work hard ; but when their work is done, they enjoy themselves 
thoroughly, they do not hide themselves away, they come into the 
open air and enjoy themselves to their heart's content. I wish 
you could see on a pleasant summer Sunday afternoon two or 
three hundred thousand of these "immoral" people enjoying 
themselves, like happy children, in the Prater. Vienna has the 
great advantage of possessing the finest surroundings of any large 
town in Europe. A half-hour's walk from the town on either side 
brings you to the country, where you could imagine yourself say in 
the Isle of Wight or in Devonshire, and on the opposite direction 
the scenery resembles that of the Highlands of Scotland. Thither 
the inhabitants go picnicing on Sundays and holidays. All the 
inhabitants enjoy themselves almost within sight of each other. 
How on earth, then, that high degree of immorality of which that 
English author speaks can take place, I, for one, cannot very 
well understand. 

The Viennese are a good-natured people, and I have here a few 
books which were edited by that most unfortunate of men, the 
late Crown Prince of Austria. It has been said that the House 
of Hapsburg are the most cruel and despotic of tyrants, and so 
forth. But let me state what are the real facts. The Emperor 
of Austria lives in a house which there is no word in the English 
language to describe. It is like a passage, anybody and every- 
body can go through that house ; in fact, it is the main communica- 
tion between the inner town and the largest of the suburbs. 
Omnibuses and cabs, etc., pass through it. Twice a week the 
Emperor of Austria gives public audience to any one and every one. 
Those who have any petition to make, or any grievance to state, 
have only to send in their name in writing, and they are at once 
admitted. There are no policemen or guards to prevent any one 
going into the Emperor's house who wishes to have an audience 
with him. Now this Emperor had a son whose lamentable death 
you have doubtless all heard of. This son edited a book, in 
which you will see there are three sketches of typical Viennese — a 
Viennese cabman, a washerwoman, and a boy. If you will look 
carefully at these, you will appreciate more than you could from a 
hundred lectures what the inhabitants of Vienna are really like. 
Do that man's characteristics and type of feature give you the idea 
of a most awful person full of vice, etc. 



Austria. 27 

Well, now, as I said before, the present Austro-Hungarian 
Monarchy consists of two parts. It would be very dry and 
uninteresting were I to tell you how many inhabitants each of 
these provinces has, and to no purpose. Allow me only to make 
a few remarks. The inhabitants of Austria number 39,100,000. 
You will see, therefore, that the Austro-Hungarian Empire is not 
" une quantite negiigeable" i.e., not to be thrown entirely aside. 
It has more inhabitants than Great Britain and Ireland. The 
Austrian people are good natured, but they can give as good an 
account of themselves as any other people, more especially have 
they done so in the past when allied to English soldiers, which 
fortunately they almost always have been. There has been only 
a single case, in 17 16, where Austrian and English soldiers were 
not standing shoulder to shoulder. And in the Austrian army 
and administration several of the very highest posts are filled by 
Englishmen, or let us say, by " subjects of Great Britain, because 
they happen to be Irishmen.'' The present Prime Minister of 
Austria, Count Taafe, is just as much an Irishman as, or much 
more I should say, than even Parnell himself. He comes from a 
very old Irish stock, and amongst the titles which he still writes 
after his name is one connected with the Castle of Bally " some- 
thing.'' The Emperor's first aide-de-camp, O'Donnell, is also an 
Irishman. Lacey, one of the greatest Austrian generals, the 
same ; and if I am not mistaken, several members of the Austrian 
Parliament are descendants of old Irish families. One of the 
best speeches, I think, I ever heard in the Austrian Parliament was 
by one named Skene, who was also of Irish descent. Therefore 
you will see that Austria and Great Britain have many sympathies 
in common, and I am sure nobody should say very much bad of 
Austria on that account. 

I am afraid, what I have now to say will not be very amusing 
for most of my kind hearers. But the object of these lectures 
consists also in giving some information concerning the political 
institutions of different foreign countries ; and, unfortunately, I 
know that politics are very seldom amusing, except for those to 
whom they are a stepping-stone to celebrity or wealth. 

Austria, or rather that part of Austria with which I have to deal 
to-day, namely, the Cis-Leithanian part of the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire, is a constitutional country. Its constitution, or to speak 
more correctly, its constitutions, for there are several of them in 
existence, are all quite new, of very recent date. Until 1848 Austria 
was governed by the Emperor as Autocrat, or as Despot (in the old 



28 National Life and Thought. 

Greek sense of this word). Though there had been diets in 
existence since the sixteenth century, they were mere shadows 
without the slightest influence or power. They languished as 
machines, without a will of their own, simply for the purpose of 
registering the decrees of the Emperor. Some of the Emperors 
governed despotically in the modern meaning of this term, while 
during the reign of some quite a patriarchal system of govern- 
ment was the order of the day. Poor Emperor Joseph, the son 
of Marie Theresa, nourished quite Liberal ideas, but the clerical 
and feudal opposition from the highest in the land was too strong 
even for him, and he died broken-hearted. Francis the Second 
was rather good-natured, and not at all cruel as long as nobody 
dared to oppose his absolute system of government, but even 
the least attempt to propagate Liberal ideas was crushed with 
terrible rigour. The people's duty was simply to obey and not 
to think for themselves. Public affairs were entirely "forbidden 
fruit" for the subjects; they might discuss the theatre, the opera, 
or the ballet; they might have given dinners to celebrate and 
to praise all the public virtues of a Barnum of that time ; or the 
Press might have banqueted the great Pears of the period, and 
the greatest men in the land would have been proud to assist 
on those occasions, but politics were entirely tabooed. Notoriety 
hunters and self-advertising quacks among all the professions had 
it then all to themselves. But I am treading on delicate ground, 
and I will come back to poor benighted Austria before 1848, 
where such occurrences might have taken place. 

The February revolution in Paris in 1848, the dethronement 
of Louis Philippe, excited the people of Vienna in the highest 
degree. Almost over night they also made a revolution, drove 
from power and country the all-mighty Metternich, and demanded 
a constitution, liberty of conscience, liberty of the Press, a 
Parliament, and all the rest of the institutions which existed in 
constitutional countries. The Emperor Ferdinand, a very weak, 
half-witted man, granted everything. 

But it would take too much time to give you a history of the 
development of political life in Austria. You all know, perhaps, 
that the reaction carried on with a high hand from 1852 until 
i860, when, after the Italian war, the Emperor again began to 
have recourse to constitutional means in a somewhat modest way. 
Only after the German war in 1866 the present constitutional and 
dualistic system of government commenced in the Empire of the 
Hapsburgs, in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. 



A ustria. 



29 



Austria Proper (Cis-Leithanian) and Hungary form two separate 
parts of the Empire, united through the person of the Emperor, 
who is also King of Hungary, and further united by certain 
Parliamentary institutions, which both parts of the Empire have 
in common. Though each part of the Empire has a Parliament 
of its own, yet certain common affairs, viz. the army and navy, 
foreign and consular affairs, certain money matters, etc., are 
discussed and settled by the so-called " Delegations." These 
delegations are, so to say, committees of the two Parliaments, to 
whom the above-mentioned matters are referred. Each delegation 
meets and discusses separately the matters laid before it by the 
Cabinet; they communicate with each other in writing; and only 
when a matter cannot be agreed upon after three " opinions in 
writing " have been exchanged by the delegations/then both dele- 
gations meet together, and the question is discussed as well as 
voted upon by both delegations, who ad hoc constitute then one 
Parliamentary body. 

The Hungarian as well as the Austrian Parliament possess all 
the well-known privileges, and do the same work as most other 
representatives of the people. There are two Houses of Parliament 
in Austria — the House of Lords and the House of Commons ; 
Cabinet Ministers have a right to sit and speak in both Houses, 
even if not members of the House. The ministers are responsible 
to Parliament. Both Houses have legislative powers, Bills can be 
brought in either by the Cabinet or by members. The multifarious 
business of the House of Commons in reference to matters of 
administration, etc., are dealt with in Austria by competent 
Government officers, and not by elected members of the House of 
Commons. The right of questioning the Government is much 
more limited than in England. In theory all this sounds very 
well, but in practice Austria cannot very well be called as yet a real 
Parliamentary country ; for, after all, in some departments, say, for 
instance, concerning foreign affairs and certain military questions, 
the Emperor, and not Parliament, is the supreme power, not 
dejure, but de facto. Austria possesses also besides its Parliament 
seventeen diets — Landtage. These small Parliaments legislate upon 
all matters which concern the interest of the province alone, and 
which do not touch general interests of the whole Cis-Leithanian 
part of the Empire. They are a kind of enlarged county councils, 
or, if you like to call them so, a species of Home Rule Parliaments 
for the different parts of the realm. 

Concerning the religion of the Austrians, it may be interesting 



30 National Life and Thought. 

to know that out of the thirty-nine million population there are 
twenty-nine millions Roman Catholics. Next to them come 
Protestants, numbering 3,572,961. Orthodox Greeks (which 
means the same as the Russians are), 2,900,000 ; but, strange to 
say, in Austria alone are to be found Catholics who call themselves 
Greek Catholics, and among these there has always been the 
greatest trouble going on between Russia and Austria. This was 
one of the greatest and most serious difficulties between Austria 
and Russia. People think that politics are the worst diffi- 
culties between them. But the great question is whether the 
Greek Catholics should preponderate to Vienna or to St. 
Petersburg. 

The great majority of the people of Austria live an agricultural 
life, and until 1848 the number of manufactures was indeed very 
insignificant compared, let us say, with England. But since 1848 
very great progress has been made. Two-fifths of the population 
of the Empire are now employed in manufactures. 

And now let me come to a point which is much more 
important, and that is education. After all, soldiering, wars, 
and such things do not occur, fortunately, very often, and 
especially do not interest many here. But the questions of 
education, how many children go to school in the country, that 
is perhaps for Englishmen the most important, the most interest- 
ing question. In Austria education is compulsory; that is to 
say, every child which is over six years old is compelled to go to 
school. But if I were speaking in Austria, people would laugh if 
I said a child is compelled to go to school. What, compel a 
child to go to school ! Why, it is his great good fortune that he 
is allowed to go. On the contrary, it would be compelled not to 
go to school. Therefore it is not considered at all compulsory, 
but it is considered highly beneficent for the people that it is so. 
In Austria every child goes to school from the sixth to the 
thirteenth year of their age. From thirteen to fifteen they have 
Sunday schools in the afternoon for two hours. There are in 
Austria three million children of the age of six years who ought to 
go to school. Now, how many of these do not go to school ? 
Only seventy. I should think you will agree with me, that is not a 
very bad record for such a benighted country as Austria. In 
Hungary, on the other hand, which is far superior to Austria as 
far as politics are concerned, it is quite different. In Hungary 
there are 1,312,371 children who ought to go to school, and there 
are actually attending school 1,304,000, so that actually 8000 do 



Austria. 



31 



not go to school out of one million, so that the percentage is 
worse in that politically better developed country than in Austria. 
Now the question is this : Is it better for a nation that the children 
should go to school, or that every man over twenty-one years of 
age should once in five years be able to vote for a Member of 
Parliament ? Permit me to say that the Austrians have the same 
right to vote for Members of Parliament, for there is also a 
Parliament for Austria. The number of Grammar Schools in 
Austria Proper is 131, and the number of teachers 2601. There 
are 11 Universities. In Vienna the University has 272 professors, 
teachers, and so forth, and 5606 students, not a very bad record 
for such a benighted town. Then, besides, there are special 
schools, technical, high schools, etc. In Vienna there is a High 
School for Agriculture alone. It has 31 professors and 340 
students. There is also a School of Forestry, with 20 professors. 
So, you will see, the question of education is not lost there. 

But the greatest claim of the Austrians, and of the Viennese 
especially, is that they are a music-loving people. You are, I 
daresay, all aware that Vienna claims to be, and that she has been 
and is, the seat of Music. I need only mention a few names to 
show that this claim of Vienna is not ill founded. Every one has 
heard the names of Mozart, of Schubert, and of Haydn. The 
operas of Mozart, the songs of Schubert, and the music of Haydn 
are certainly more or less known wherever civilised human beings 
meet ; and, I am sure, no one will deny that they give more enjoy- 
ment than the reading of all the Blue Books that have ever been 
published by Parliament. I, for one, take the liberty of saying 
that the country which has produced such men has given to the 
world more enjoyment and more of the blessings of real peace 
than any other. 

The next proudest claim of Vienna to celebrity is her Medical 
Schools. It is well known in English professional circles that 
for twenty-five years and more that the Medical faculty in the 
University of Vienna was far above all others. The greatest 
English physicians have all been in Vienna and attended lectures 
there, which is not such a bad position for a country of which 
it has been said, "Show me a spot on earth where she has done 
any good." 

Furthermore, the Austrians are the happy possessors of more 
good watering places than any other country in the world, such as 
Carlsbad, Gastein, etc. Even in this minor capacity Austria may 
be truly said to have been of much service to the sick and the aged, 



32 National Life and Thought. 

and therefore permit me to conclude my remarks by saying that, 
after all, Austria is not such a " poor benighted " country as it is 
alleged to be, and that a great many benefits have been conferred 
on the human race, not only by Austria, but by that " most 
immoral " city, Vienna itself. 



III. 

HUNGAR Y. 

PROFESSOR AUGUSTUS PULSZKY. 

ABOUT a century ago, when the sympathies of the people 
of Western Europe were first aroused in favour of wronged 
and struggling Poland, French writers often complimented the 
Poles on being " the French of the North," and this allusion to 
the similarity of character was invariably accepted as a flattering 
expression of appreciation. At the same period, and for many 
years afterwards, the denomination of " the England of the East " 
was sometimes claimed with fond complacency by Hungarians 
for their own country, desiring to impress foreigners with the 
marked difference between the people of Hungary and their 
unfortunate Northern neighbours. Of course, nobody dreamt 
of seriously comparing the culture, the development, the power, 
and the prosperity of the two nations, one of which, after centuries 
of freedom and enterprise, had risen to become the proud mistress 
of the seas, while the other had served as the bulwark of civilised 
Christendom against the attacks of Mohammedan Turkey, 
and bore resemblance rather to a shattered outlying bastion of 
a half-abandoned fortress than to the fields of the culture of the 
West. Still, as is generally the case with expressions that grow 
into stock phrases, there had been and there lingered yet a grain 
of truth in the analogy between Hungary and England. A 
certain similarity marked the origin of both — nor is it difficult to 
establish a parallel between the history, the institutions, nay, even 
between the very life and modes of thought of the world- 
renowned and splendid realm of liberty in the Western Isles, 
and of the comparatively obscure kingdom which had just but 
succeeded in maintaining its existence amidst the storms that 
had ravaged Eastern Europe, and which, after all, was the only 
state on the Continent that at the end of the last century had 
managed to uphold unimpaired its uninterrupted traditions of 
legal freedom. And to this very day, although the position and 



34 'National Life and Thought. 

the destinies of the two nations are as unequal as ever, a certain 
distant family likeness may still be detected between them. 
None of the other countries, except England and Hungary, are 
able to appeal to the unbroken continuity of ten centuries of 
constitutional development ; none other have preserved a flexible 
constitution, capable of alteration by the regular methods of 
legislation, and not based upon any rigid written Charter; in 
none but these two did that mixed form of government contin- 
ually prevail in which the distribution of the powers of the 
monarchy, and of the aristocratical and democratical elements, 
may have actually considerably changed in the course of time, 
without either of these having ever been entirely suppressed, or 
the balance of power irretrievably destroyed, even at the most 
critical juncture. 

The secret of this resemblance of institutions and of the 
concomitant ideas and feelings is easily discovered in certain 
common features of the history of the two commonwealths. 
From the days of Queen Elizabeth, when England definitely 
adopted Protestant supremacy, the cause of national independence 
was always intimately allied to that of liberty. The political 
existence of the English nation, religious and civil freedom, were 
alike imperilled by the Spanish Armada. During the following 
century the more insidious but equally dangerous endeavours of 
Louis XIV. of France, though menacing more directly consti- 
tutional government, were none the less indirectly aimed against 
religious independence, and against the assertion of a separate 
national policy. Again, in the wars provoked by the aggressions 
of the French Revolution and the ambition of Napoleon, the 
defence of the existing constitution and the consolidation of the 
British Empire were indissolubly connected. The same holds 
good as to Hungary. From the day following the dire calamity 
of the lost battle of Mohacs, where the separate and independent 
development of the kingdom, together with King Louis II. 
himself, fell a victim to the victorious sword of Sultan Suleyman, 
throughout all the civil wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies, throughout the political atrophy of the eighteenth, throughout 
the constitutional struggles in the nineteenth, the revolution of 
1848-49 and the passive resistance offered to the attempts of Aus- 
trian centralization afterwards, down to the period of the definite 
arrangement with the dynasty and the so-called Cis-Leithanian 
hereditary kingdoms and provinces of the Emperor of Austria, the 
efforts for the re-establishment and support of a national state 



Hungary. 25 

were at all times necessarily connected with the defence of 
constitutional freedom, with the vindication of religious tolerance 
and of the legal recognition of the different Churches, with the 
maintenance of the political rights of the people, with the gradual 
development of the liberty of the subject, and with the economical 
emancipation of the lower orders. The national aspirations, the 
full outcome of the traditions of the past, were never for one 
moment dissociated from the endeavours to realise any part of 
what constitutes moral and material progress. Elements which in 
other continental countries were continually clashing with each 
other, and, when fully revealed, showed themselves to be discordant 
and antagonistic beyond remedy, were in Hungary indissolubly 
fused into one single sentiment, leavened by law-abiding respect 
for formal rights, by reverence for institutions which formerly had 
been the expression of the national mind, and prompted in no lesser 
degree by yearnings for spiritual liberty and by the instinctive 
desire of acquiring prosperity. In connection with this prevailing 
feeling, the idea of attaining and ensuring the complete national 
polity of Hungary became endowed with a magnetic power that 
attracted into its sphere, and united in it all the motives, all the 
forces of the people, which otherwise might have impelled its 
different sections and classes in divergent directions. 

Indeed, this all-pervading, deep-rooted feeling of the supremacy 
of the national interest is the keynote of the life and thought of 
the Hungarian people, and furnishes a clue to the explanation of 
the differences that strike the observer when comparing its charac- 
teristics with those of the inhabitants of the surrounding countries. 
For a citizen of the British Empire, which embraces the fairest 
portions of the globe, spreads over all the latitudes of the earth, 
and rules over countless races of mankind ; for a member of a 
commonwealth the population and wealth of which have long ago 
overflowed the boundaries of a merely national existence ; for an 
Englishman sure, as he may well be, of the language he speaks 
and thinks in, and of the civilisation in which he has been 
nurtured, and to the pale of which he belongs, of both his language 
and civilisation having struck root and flourishing in the most 
different parts of the world, and serving the needs and guiding the 
destinies of new nations which have grown equal to and are 
perhaps overshadowing the old ; for the scion of a people that can 
afford to be, nay, to a certain extent needs must be cosmopolitan, 
— it is scarcely possible to realise the intensity of the spirit of 
nationality, where all that makes life worth living, in a higher 



36 National Life and Thought. 

sense, where all bonds of community extending beyond immediate 
private ties and aims, where every nobler and more generous 
impulse that stirs the blood or fires the imagination is concentrated 
to a single object, and where, according to popular estimation, the 
virtue of patriotism, which elsewhere, too, ranks high, but is 
deemed to be equalled, and perhaps even overbalanced, by rival 
qualities, is accounted as paramount and incomparable to any 
other, because including and absorbing the attributes of all 
excellence proper to human nature. The consolidation of the 
German Empire, the unification of Italy, are examples of the 
magnitude of the immanent power set free by statesmen who were 
endowed with foresight and ability sufficient to arouse the long 
dormant sense of nationality. Still, the most striking illustration 
of the potency of the spell exercised by the consciousness of 
common and single national destinies is not afforded by the cases 
of these great agglomerations, to the perfecting of which innumer- 
able other causes have contributed in no lesser degree, but rather 
by the persistent and unconquerable energy by virtue of which a 
people, comparatively weak in numbers, without racial affinity with 
its surroundings, isolated in its language, lacking natural means of 
communication, wealthy neither in intellectual traditions nor in 
acquired capital, continually menaced, on several occasions 
overrun, by enemies more numerous, more powerful, sometimes 
more cultivated than itself, has succeeded in holding its own 
during a thousand years, and in securing for the organism of its 
commonwealth the recognition of an adequate and firm position 
amongst the acknowledged civilised States of Europe. 

The deep hold which the spirit of nationality has obtained over 
the citizens of Hungary, and the matchless importance it has 
acquired as regards all the interests of the community, the struc- 
ture and the agency of the social fabric, comparable only with 
the supremacy of the questions of faith in England during the 
seventeenth century, is all the more interesting by the contrast 
it affords to the spectacle presented by the circumstances which 
led to the establishment of the national States of Germany and 
Italy. Nationality based upon a community of descent, language, 
thought, literature, and religious interest, was pre-existent in these 
latter cases ; the aspiration towards unity, the violent irresistible 
craving for framing a single organisation out of provinces that had 
never been knit together, in the past, by an adequate tie, were 
only awakened after centuries of separate existence, were the 
realisation of an idea that had a long antecedent history. In 



Hungary. 37 

Hungary, as with the nations of Western Europe, it was the 
reverse process that took place. The Kingdom of Hungary had 
been established for countless generations, national and foreign 
dynasties had repeatedly alternated on its throne, before the full 
requirements and consequences of a truly national life were in 
their entirety apprehended, demanded, and enforced. Moreover, 
to this very day it is not the exclusiveness of pride in purity of 
race, it is not a supercilious contempt for aliens, or the separateness 
and aloofness engendered by religious prejudice, or intolerance of 
unaccustomed ways and expressions of thought, that form the 
backbone of national sentiment in Hungary. There is no place 
in the world where people belonging to more varied and 
distinct stocks live and mingle together, where on an area of 
equal extent more languages, so entirely unconnected, are spoken, 
where the allegiance of faith is divided amongst religions so 
numerous, and where true tolerance, in the sense of a ready 
admission of equal, or, at least, of proportionately assigned rights 
has, to such a degree, become absolutely necessary in the common 
relations of life. Speaking in round numbers, six and a-half 
millions of Magyars, two and a-half of Roumenes, two and one- 
third of Croato-Serbs, nearly two millions of Germans, only a few 
thousands fewer of Slovacks, three hundred and fifty thousand 
Ruthenes, and about a hundred thousand of diverse motley 
minor nationalities, such as Wends, Italians, Armenians, and 
Gipsies, live peaceably, side by side, in a population close to 
sixteen millions, all of them interspersed in the different sections 
of the territory of Hungary; while the list of religions and creeds 
includes seven millions eight hundred and fifty thousand Roman, 
one million and a-half Greek, and three thousand Armenian- 
Catholics, over two million Calvinists, one million one hundred 
and thirty thousand Lutheran Protestants, fifty-five thousand 
Unitarians, two millions four hundred and forty thousand 
members of the Oriental Greek Churches, and six hundred and 
forty thousand Jews. Nor do the lines dividing different races- 
and tongues coincide with those separating the religious denomin- 
ations. Every nationality counts members belonging to different 
Church-establishments ; almost every creed includes adherents of 
several distinct nationalities ; besides, persons belonging to each 
are found in every class of society. All are equally citizens of 
Hungary ; still, the dominant sentiment of the country is, and 
cannot but be, the Magyar, not in virtue of any privilege in law, 
but simply because it is the Magyar element that has formed and 



38 National Life and Thought. 

upheld the Hungarian nation, because it has been the nucleus 
around which the other parts of the population have rallied, 
because the Magyars have known how to identify with their own 
the common interests of the rest, compared with which the 
separate aims of each were partly rendered compatible by a 
generous policy, and partly felt to be insignificant ; because, to 
sum up the manifold reasons in a single expression, the Magyar 
State, culture, and law have unceasingly served as the sole possible 
condition of the development and liberty of every fraction of the 
people. 

The causes that have concurred in producing these results may 
easily be seen written large in the course of history. It is exactly 
a thousand years ago, at the same period when the Northmen 
ravaged the shores of the West, settled in Northern France, and 
founded the houses of the rulers and the aristocracy of half of 
Europe, that the Magyars or Hungarians entered the country 
bounded by the Carpathians and by the flanking spurs of the 
eastern and southern Alps, which forms the great basin of the 
middle course of the Danube. They conquered it, settled in it, 
and for the first time in history established a united and stable 
realm in this part of Europe. Formerly only those portions lying 
near its boundaries had temporarily belonged to the sphere of 
civilised states ; the great plains between and along the Danube 
;uid the Theiss had never formed the seat of a nation before the 
Hungarian immigration. A large part of the territory was at the 
time a scarcely inhabited waste ; the mountainous and hilly 
districts, covered by forests, were sparsely occupied in the North 
and in the South by a Slavonic, and in the West by a German 
population. The number, however, of the conquering Magyars, 
though sufficient to ensure their victory and to render them 
terrible to their western and southern neighbours, was not large 
enough to fill the expanse of the provinces their valour had 
acquired and their determination was able to defend permanently. 
Hence foreign elements were introduced, first by compulsion, 
later on, as Christianity was adopted, by invitation and grants of 
royal privileges ; and the policy ushered in by the great King 
Stephen, the Apostle-Saint of his people, and continued by his 
successors, consisted mainly in inducing immigrants from all parts 
to settle and gradually to infuse their life into that of the realm. 
The institutions of Western countries, the ideas embodied in the 
capitularies of Charlemagne and his successors, and in the laws 
of the Church, were adopted and adapted to the Magyar traditions, 



Hungary. 39 

in which the germs of self-government and of the participation 
of the subjects in the sovereign power were deeply ingrained; 
constitutional government was gradually developed out of these 
rudiments in conjunction with the moral and legal conceptions, 
which formed the common heritage of mediaeval semi-Latin civil- 
isation under the fostering care of the Roman Catholic Church. 
Thus in the twelfth and thirteenth century the annals of Hungary 
present an absolute parallel to those of the Western countries, 
all the more, because the pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire 
to over-lordship were successfully repulsed. It is therefore no 
mere freak of history that the Golden Bull of Andrew II., analo- 
gous both in its antecedents and contents to the Magna Charta 
of England, was granted to the nation within a few years of the 
success of the English barons at Runymede ; nor is it a coincid- 
ence, occasioned by chance alone, that the demands of the Pope 
for feudal supremacy, and his attempts at foisting a sovereign of 
his choice on the nation, were equally resisted in Hungary as in 
England. 

Still, the increase of the population was not able to keep pace 
with the advance of culture. The best blood of the foreign 
settlers was continually absorbed by the ruling Hungarian 
element, which was never chary of admitting into the pale of 
social and political rights all those who, unreservedly, took part 
in the tasks of the organisation and defence of the nation. As 
to the kingdom itself, it never recognised any aristocracy of race. 
Yet the continual drain occasioned by incessant wars — the strain 
upon the Magyars who had principally to sustain the military 
burdens — always rendered new immigrants welcome. Especially 
the great Mongolian invasion of 1241 decimated the country, and 
the Roumenian and Ruthenian populations were gradually settled 
in their present abodes, for the most part about the second half 
of the thirteenth century. 

During the two hundred years that followed, from the four- 
teenth to the sixteenth centuries, Hungary, under the rule of the 
elective Kings belonging to the Neapolitan Anjou, the Bohemian 
Luxemburg, the Austrian Hapsburg, the native Corvine, and the 
Polish Jagellone dynasties, sought to establish itself as the centre 
of an empire, under the suzerainty of which Bosnia, Servia, 
Wallachia, and Moldavia were to occupy the position of feudatary 
provinces, and these efforts were to some degree crowned with 
success. The spirit of imperial destinies again attracted promin- 
ent members of every minor nationality to follow the instinct 



40 National Life and Thought. 

of the unity of the Hungarian State. At the same time, a 
continual tendency was manifested towards forming a stable 
union by the identity of the monarch in Hungary, and in one or 
the other of the great neighbouring kingdoms. This was attempted, 
as regards Poland, by Louis the Great, and by Sigismund with 
reference to the Holy Roman Empire. Later on, as the Turkish 
power loomed up, menacing from the South, the task of ensuring 
assistance in defence of Christendom against the encroachments 
of the growing Mohammedan power became more imminent, and 
both the House of Austria and Matthias Hunyadi rivalled each 
other in the attempt to join the hereditary eastern dominions of 
the Hapsburgs and Hungary permanently into a single system. 
The Jagellones at last actually succeeded in uniting the crowns 
of Hungary and of Bohemia on their heads. But in connection 
with these endeavours there necessarily arose in Hungary the 
conviction of danger to Hungarian independence and to con- 
stitutional liberty, from the Kings having under such circum- 
stance an at least equal regard for the interests of another foreign 
country. Hence a certain tone of legal opposition was given to 
the national sentiment, which was destined to exercise a consid- 
erable influence over its further development — all the more 
because it was at this very juncture that the common law of the 
realm was systematically collected in the so-called Tripartite 
Institutes of the great jurist Verboczy; and that, in consequence, 
all the elements of the State became fully conscious of the precise 
extent and limits of their rights, and of the influence each in turn 
could claim in the shaping and determining the course of the 
nation's life. 

Up to this period the tenor of the history of Hungary essen- 
tially coincides with the contemporary vicissitudes of other 
countries. But the simultaneous occurrence of three momentous 
changes, the Turkish conquest, the separation of Transylvania, 
and the Reformation, was to determine a novel and tragical turn 
in the fate of the realm. Its dynasty and power were shattered 
by the onslaught of the Turks, who subsequently for a hundred 
and fifty years occupied the central plains, and oppressed and 
devastated the homes of the richest and sturdiest part of the 
Hungarian people. The rest of the country was torn into two ; 
the western half raised to the throne and acknowledged the rule 
of the House of Hapsburg, which was thus able to unite in the 
person of the ruler the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Empire, of 
Bohemia and of Hungary, besides disposing of the strength of its 



Hungary. 41 

hereditary provinces, the hopes of assistance by which had con- 
stituted the principal reason for the election of the head of the 
Austrian dynasty to Hungarian royalty. The eastern counties of 
Hungary, not subject to the Turks, gathered around the princi- 
pality of Transylvania, which, under elective native dynasties, 
organised itself separately, with the firm intent, however, of 
joining in the reconstitution of the realm so soon as this might be 
feasible after the expulsion of the Ottoman invaders. The Pro- 
testant Reformation meanwhile rapidly spread over the whole 
country ; permeated all classes of the population ; gave the people 
a new interest in religion, in education, and in literature; supplied 
a new opportunity for the development of self-government in its 
ecclesiastical institutions ; but it also inevitably entailed upon the 
coming generations the secular dissensions and bitter struggles 
which for the moment still further weakened the enfeebled nation, 
although destined later on to elicit its full enthusiasm in the 
defence of constitutional rights, and ultimately to lead to the 
establishment of religious tolerance and of the liberty of con- 
science. 

From 1526 to the end of the seventeenth century Hungary was 
thus the scene of continual depredations, of wars, and of civil and 
religious strifes ; and in spite of the patriotism of great leaders on 
both sides, of the Bathorys, of Bocskay, Bethlen, and Rakoczy, of 
the Zrinyis, of Cardinal Pazman, and of Eszterhazy, — in spite of the 
brilliant successes achieved from time to time, which assisted in 
keeping up the spirit of the people, and continually preserved the 
consciousness of common interests and single national destinies, 
the population, as well as the wealth of the country, was 
diminishing fast; and although poetical and religious feelings 
were aroused to a high pitch, although science was earnestly 
cultivated, and thus the conviction of a happier future, and of the 
assertion of the unity and independence of Hungary was main- 
tained, yet the decrease in numbers, power, and influence became 
undeniable, and the melancholy cast acquired by popular senti- 
ment in those well-nigh hopeless days of darkness has ever since 
remained a marked trait in the character of the people. 

At last, in 1686, Buda, the ancient capital of Hungary, was 
retaken, and by the end of the seventeenth century the territory 
of the entire kingdom recovered from the domination of the 
Turks. Not, however, by Magyar forces alone, but by the 
imperial army, under Charles of Lorraine and Eugene of Savoy, 
an army of which the Hungarian troops formed no small con- 



42 National Life and Thought. 

tingent, but which otherwise was composed mainly of levies and 
volunteers from almost all the countries of Europe, and received 
considerable subsidies from Pope Innocent XI. The consequence 
was that attempts were made by the ministers of the Emperor and 
King Leopold I. to assimilate Hungary with the hereditary 
provinces of Austria, to suspend and abolish the constitution, 
to extirpate Protestantism, to germanise the Administration, to 
establish the absolutism of the Court of Vienna over a people 
that, it was supposed, would with the lapse of time forget the 
memories of its separate existence, and be content to merge into 
the mass of subjects, denuded of political rights, which constituted 
the bulk of the inhabitants of the inherited dominions of the 
Hapsburgs. But the Magyar population, although reduced in 
strength and pride, had preserved enough of vitality and energy 
to resist forcibly these endeavours of sanguinary proselytism and 
of despotical centralization ; and it was only after long-undecided 
civil convulsions, coinciding with the War of the Spanish Succes- 
sion, that peace was secured, the constitution of Hungary re- 
established, and the dynasty and the realm completely reconciled. 
But a great part of the territory had been laid waste, and was 
absolutely depopulated, and on this Serb, German, and Slovack 
immigrants were settled, " hewers of wood and drawers of water," 
who were a valuable addition to the resources of the country, but 
who required a long apprenticeship before growing ripe for 
political liberty, and being able to acknowledge as their own the 
inspirations of national life. 

As the decades of the eighteenth century succeeded each other, 
without the internal peace of the country being disturbed, though 
there was no lack of foreign wars and of sacrifices for upholding 
the right of succession of the great Queen Maria Theresa, estab- 
lished by the acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction, and for 
advancing the interests of the Austrian hereditary provinces, the 
community and mutuality of the defence of which, with that of 
Hungary, had been legally provided for — slowly and gradually the 
nation, and especially the upper and middle classes, composed 
almost entirely of landed proprietors, attained a considerable 
measure of material prosperity. Notwithstanding, a certain 
torpor, like the uneasy sleep of exhaustion after feverish excite- 
ment, crept over the minds of the people. Tied down to the 
feeble policy of the sinking Holy Roman Empire, removed from 
the great questions of European import, which were managed 
exclusively by the Viennese Chanceries, deprived of the healthy 



Hungary. 43 

stimulants of commerce and industry, which were monopolised by 
the more advanced town-inhabitants and capitalists of Austria and 
Bohemia, competition with whom was again excluded by an 
elaborate fiscal system of duties along all the frontiers, and cut off 
from immediate contact with the progress of Western Europe by 
the system of absolutism which rendered the hereditary provinces 
an almost impervious barrier to the entrance of novel ideas — 
Hungary fell into a sort of fatalistic quietism, during which it 
came perhaps nearer to losing its independence, its feeling of 
proper personality and identity, even its very language, and thus 
incurred a danger by far greater than had ever been the case 
under the blows of its adverse fortunes. Its governing nobility, 
apprehensive of the recurrence of events that might justify or, at 
least, furnish pretexts for new schemes of subverting the constitu- 
tion of the realm — already isolated on the Continent of Europe — 
dreaded and warded off all legal change and reform, and became 
attached to the doctrines and practices of extreme provincial 
Conservatism. The technical Latin of mediaeval documents quite 
supplanted the Hungarian language in the business of legislation, 
of administration, of the courts of law, and often even in the 
common intercourse of private life. The watchword of liberty had 
by a scarcely perceptible misuse degenerated into being synony- 
mous with the expression of aristocratical privilege, and the 
traditions of dearly acquired rights had been corrupted into 
jealousy of their further extension. The masses Avere looked upon 
as the "misera plebs contribuens? a miserable populace of tax- 
payers; the few hundred thousands of the privileged classes 
imagined themselves to be the totality of the nation, and in their 
ignorant scorn were fond of repeating, " Extra Hungariam non 
est vita ; si est vita, non est ita " — " Beyond Hungary there is no 
life; if there is any, it does not come up to ours." 

The turn of the tide, however, came yet in time to arouse the 
nation. The well-meaning but impracticable bureaucratic in- 
novations of the Emperor Joseph II., who refused to have himself 
crowned King, being unwilling to burden his conscience with 
oaths of upholding a constitution he wished to abolish, dispelled 
the dreams cherished as to the security of the ancient institutions, 
and evoked an active opposition to the denationalizing tendencies, 
which had been carefully fostered, and now were openly avowed 
by the court. The supreme importance of a national spirit in the 
development of Hungary, if it meant to retain its individuality as 
a State, the necessity of national ideals, of a broader and more 



44 National Life and Thought. 

enlightened patriotism, even for the leading classes, flashed upon 
the minds of the whole people ; and the excitement occasioned by 
the democratical doctrines of the French Revolution, which had 
penetrated only so much as to merely touch the higher social 
layers, soon polished off the rust that had settled on their minds. 

In the memorable Parliament of 1791-92 the principles of in- 
dependence, of political, civil, and religious liberty were asserted 
anew, feelings of enthusiasm were kindled for the national 
language, and for the first time again, after a secular neglect, the 
interests of the masses began to be considered. The movement 
was arrested, and the realisation of the more high-minded 
proposals adjourned in consequence of the revolutionary and 
Napoleonic Wars and of the reactionary policy all over the 
Continent, of which the Viennese Government became the 
stronghold. For the first quarter of the present century even the 
manifestation of Liberal views was effectually suppressed ; and 
later on, all legal changes were hampered by the refusal of the 
Government to assent to them, and by the predominant influence 
of the Court in the House of Lords. But even though the actual 
institutions and the material conditions remained undeveloped, 
the progress of the ideas could not be stopped ; and thus even- 
tually, as the times ripened, the changes could be effected in an 
easier and more even manner. Public opinion gradually grew 
too strong to be successfully opposed any longer. Great leaders 
of the nation arose. Count Sze'chenyi from amongst the members 
of the Aristocracy urged economical reforms in the first place, 
demanding laws for the establishment of credit, favouring industry, 
developing communication, instituting social and humanitarian 
clubs, and, above all, raising the cry for universal and equal 
taxation. Francis Deak, essentially the representative of the 
middle classes, but whose noble and enlightened patriotism, 
disinterestedness, moderation, wisdom, and eloquence were to 
render him the universally acknowledged spokesman and guide of 
his people, the arbiter of their destinies, was the presiding master- 
spirit of the party of reformers who prepared the ground for the 
achievements of 1848. Last, but not least, Louis Kossuth, rising 
from the ranks of journalism, communicated the fire of his 
extraordinary genius to the whole country, and decided the 
constitutional contest in favour of the emancipation and enfran- 
chisement of the lower orders, and of the adoption of the system 
of responsible parliamentary government. The twenty years that 
elapsed between 1828 and 1848 were indeed the period of the 






Hungary. 45 

effervescence of the national spirit, which was manifested not only 
in the brilliant debates of the Legislature, not only in the self- 
governing activity of the counties, not only in the broad views of 
generous religious tolerance adopted by the adherents of all 
churches, nay, to a degree unprecedented in any other epoch or 
country, by the clerical authorities themselves, but equally so in 
poetry, especially by Vorosmarty and Petofi, in literature, and in 
all the walks and occupations of life. Nor was participation in 
public concerns any longer confined to the formerly governing 
classes. The necessity of a democratical remodelling of the 
constitution was openly avowed. It was clearly seen that the 
concurrent efforts of all elements of the nation were indispensable 
to its being raised to the eminence from which it might proudly 
claim a position equal to that of the peoples of other European 
States. 

The fruits of these struggles and labours were reaped in 1848. 
The peasantry was relieved of the dues it had to pay to the land- 
lords, in work and kind, for the use of its farms ; a considerable 
part, nearly half of the land, was made over in fee simple to the 
tenants, the compensation of the landed proprietors being assigned 
to the fund of general taxation. Class privileges were abolished, 
equality before the law was asserted, equal civil rights were 
extended to the entire population, and political rights attached to 
a comparatively low franchise. Ministerial responsibility was 
introduced, Transylvania reincorporated into Hungary, and the 
sovereign independence of the State not only theoretically re- 
established, but practically given effect to in its several institutions. 
The royal sanction was obtained to all these measures ; and the 
general hope seemed to be well founded, that all obstacles to 
peaceful progress had thus been overcome by lawful means, 
without the reproach of a single deed of violence. 

Once more, however, a cruel disappointment lay in store for the 
country. The settlement of two questions had been neglected, 
the attendant dangers underestimated, and the inexperience which 
thus afforded the enemies of Hungary a handle for carrying out 
their sinister plans was dearly paid for by the nation. Parallel 
with the expansion of Magyar sentiment in Hungary, the ambitions 
of the southern Slav population of Croats and Serbs had also 
developed. In spite of the prophetic warnings of Count Szechenyi, 
no account was taken of the symptoms of separatistic tendencies in 
Croatia. Instead of offering to this province — -the only part of 
Hungary which was geographically and historically distinct from 



46 National Life and Thought. 

the remainder, and which, while the rest of Hungary by its 
natural features is mapped out as an essential unity, seems to bear 
equally the evident marks of having been destined for a sort of 
Federal union — some degree of Home Rule, it was fused into the 
rest, nor was the equal use of the Croatian with the Magyar 
language in the Legislature conceded to its representatives. The 
feelings of dissension thus engendered, as well as the unreasoning 
hatred felt by portions of the Servian and Roumanian peasant 
populations, especially in the South and in Transylvania, against 
their former landlords, were still further inflamed by the intrigues 
of the reactionary party in Austria, and finally broke out in 
sanguinary insurrections. On the other hand, no contrivance 
had been effected by which the foreign and military policy, the 
common affairs of the Kingdom of Hungary and of the hereditary 
provinces of the Hapsburg dynasty, which constituted the Empire 
of Austria, properly so called, might be managed harmoniously 
and with common consent, especially since constitutional govern- 
ment had been introduced, not without the urgent insistance and 
assistance of the Hungarian Parliament, in Vienna, too. Besides, 
no arrangement had been made for Hungary's acknowledging and 
assuming any share of the burden of the public debt of Austria, 
incurred, partly at least, in the interest of the common policy of 
both countries. Hence misunderstandings and ill-will arose 
between the Governments and Parliaments of Vienna and 
Pest ; and a pretence, wearing some semblance of justice, was 
thus furnished for meddling with the internal affairs of Hungary, 
which the Court, anxious to do away altogether with innovations 
and constitutional government alike, was not slow in making use 
of. Thus, first an armed civil struggle ensued in the South and 
in the East ; then the Imperial Austrian Government, which, after 
quelling insurrectionary movements in Prague and Vienna, had 
practically restored Absolutism, supported the Croatian and 
Roumenian rebellions, and openly attacked Hungary. The war 
lasted for one year. The armed resistance of Hungary, strictly 
legal in the beginning, assumed a revolutionary hue when the 
abolition of the constitution and independence of the Realm 
became the avowed object of the Viennese statesmen. The 
Hungarian armies, victorious so long as they were opposed to 
the Croatian and Roumenian insurgents, and to the Austrian 
forces alone, were unable to cope with the superadded power 
of Russia, the intervention of which had taken place in the 
interests of despotism. By the end of the summer of 1849 



Hungary. 47 

Hungary was again prostrate at the feet of a relentless foe ; her 
best blood A\ r as profusely shed on the scaffold, the flower of 
her citizens were cast into prison, or escaped as fugitives into 
foreign exile. 

For twelve years the name of Hungary, as a State, was erased 
from the map of Europe. Bureaucratic Absolutism ruled supreme 
in Austria, and did its best to obliterate all Hungarian institutions. 
Germanisation was the order of the day, the German tongue 
being declared the exclusive language of official life as well as of 
the higher schools. Government was carried on by means of 
foreign, German, and Czech officials. No vestige was left, not 
only of the national independence, but either of Home Rule or of 
self-government of any sort ; the country was divided into pro- 
vinces without regard for historical traditions ; in short, an attempt 
was made to wipe out every trace denoting the existence of a 
separate Hungary. All ranks and classes opposed a sullen 
passive resistance to these attacks against the existence of the 
nation ; even the sections of the nationalities which had rebelled 
against the enactments of 1848, at the instigation of the re- 
actionary Camarilla, were equally disaffected in consequence of 
the short-sighted policy of despotical centralisation ; and it was at 
this critical phase of the national life that the diverse elements 
of the country were again welded into the unanimity of patriotic 
sentiment, that all minor differences were sunk in the passionate 
craving for the restoration of the realm and of its constitutional 
rights, and that the paramount importance of the national 
questions rendered the people definitely tolerant as to diverg- 
encies on all other issues. 

Finally, after the collapse of the system of Absolutism in 
consequence of financial disasters and of the misfortunes of the 
Italian War of 1859, the Hungarian Parliament was again con- 
voked ; and after protracted negotiations, broken off and resumed 
again, the impracticability of a system of provincial Federalism 
having been proved in the meantime, and the defeat incurred in 
the Prussian War of 1866 having demonstrated the futility of any 
reconstruction of the Empire of Austria, in which the national 
aspirations of Hungary were not taken into due consideration — 
an arrangement was concluded under the auspices of Francis 
Deak, Count Andrassy, and Count Beust on the basis of the full 
acknowledgment of the separate national existence of Hungary, and 
of the continuity of its legal rights. The idea of a centralised 
Austrian Empire had to give way to the dual Austro-Hungarian 



48 National Life and Thought. 

monarchy, which is in fact an indissoluble federation of two 
equal States, under the common rule of a single sovereign, the 
Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, each of the States 
having a constitution, government, and parliament of its own, 
Hungary especially retaining, with slight modifications, its ancient 
institutions remodelled in 1848. The administration of the 
foreign policy, the management of the army, and the disbursement 
of the expenditure necessary for these purposes, were settled upon 
as common affairs of the entire monarchy, for the management 
of which common ministers were instituted, responsible to the 
two delegations, co-equal committees of the parliaments of 
Hungary and of the Cisleithanian (Austrian) provinces. Elab- 
orate provisions were framed for the smooth working of these 
common institutions, for giving weight to the constitutional 
influence, even in matters of common policy, of the separate 
Cisleithanian and Hungarian ministries, and for rendering their 
responsibility to the respective Parliaments an earnest and solid 
reality. The financial questions pending in the two independent 
and equal States were settled by a compromise ; measures were 
taken for the equitable arrangement of all matters which might 
arise in relation to interests touching both States, such as duties, 
commerce, and indirect taxation, all legislation on these subjects 
taking place by means of identical laws separately enacted by the 
Parliament of each State. Every device human foresight and 
political ingenuity, sharpened by long experience, could suggest 
to ensure the requisites of both firmness and stability of the 
entire monarchy, as well as the maintenance of the free and 
independent national life of each of its realms, was adopted in 
order to harmonise the conditions of imperial dominion with 
those of the sovereignty of the separate constituent States. 
Simultaneously with these arrangements the political differences 
between Hungary and Croatia were compromised by granting 
provincial Home Rule to the latter, an expedient which has not 
quite done away with the difficulties that crop up from time to 
time, but which still, on the whole, has diminished the chances 
of direct collision, and, up to the present, has prevented the 
occurrence of irreconcilable conflicts. 

Thus the organisation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy on 
the basis of dualism, and the compromise entered into between 
the two halves composing it, whilst uniting for the purposes of 
defence the forces of two States of a moderate size and extent 
into those of a great empire, able to cope with the exigencies of 



Hungary. 49 

an adequate position amongst the first-class Powers of Europe, 
restored also to Hungary its independence and its unfettered 
sovereignty in all internal matters. On this solid foundation it 
was rendered possible for the country to devote its attention 
chiefly to the reform of its institutions, and to the development 
of its resources, moral as well as material. The pressure, which 
for centuries had directed the efforts of the people mainly 
towards upholding constitutional rights, and had concentrated the 
national thought into opposition to absolutistic attempts in the 
service of foreign ideas, having been removed, new channels 
were opened out for the energies of the community in all those 
directions in which the modern life of civilised nations demands 
their activity. All the great human and social interests, scientific, 
educational, administrative, sanitary, and economical, which by 
the side of the paramount claims of the national cause upon the 
people, necessitating practically the sacrifice of all minor, though 
important, aims, had formerly received merely a partial, and 
rather theoretical than actual recognition, have thus obtained 
their due position in the public view, and are able to attract the 
amount of attention and devotion they deserve; indeed, the 
proper balance of national life in Hungary has been, in conse- 
quence, re-established. 

A full picture of the life and thought of Hungary in the present 
would, therefore, merely repeat the well-known outlines of the 
social, industrial, mental, and moral features of other civilised 
communities in Europe. The Magyar has ceased to be a so-called 
" interesting nationality," Hungary has neither an eastern nor an 
antiquated character, but has simply resumed its position amongst 
the factors of Western culture. There are doubtless certain 
differences between its condition and that of other nations, but 
rather of degree than of kind, and manifesting themselves no 
longer in salient outward traits. Hungary is still far more of an 
agricultural than of a commercial, and perhaps more of a com- 
mercial than of an industrial country. Its acquired capital is not 
yet proportionate to its natural wealth, nor are its investments 
commensurate to the talent, skill, and industry of the nation. It 
is only by persevering efforts, with due patience for the accumul- 
ation of results in course of time, that essential and indubitable 
progress can be accomplished. There are, however, already 
certain social conditions as to which Hungary, even at this day, 
stands well nigh unrivalled. The bulk of the population in 
the plains and midlands is composed of a freehold peasantry, 

D 



5<D National Life and Thought. 

endowed with the franchise, accustomed to communal, and 
participating in county self-government, entirely independent in 
thought and bearing, who for public spirit, education, working 
power, and for their standards of life and comfort and wealth, 
may favourably compare with any other similar class on the face 
of the earth. The cities and towns, too, are rising fast, have 
become almost entirely Magyar in character, and are growing to 
be more and more centres of intellectual activity. 

Political life, although happily no longer occupied by con- 
stitutional questions, has not lost its attraction for the people, 
and, as is natural in a free country, absorbs a great part of public 
attention. An enormous mass of political work has been done 
since 1867, and is still going on. Elementary education has 
been rendered universal and compulsory, and the institutions for 
higher and University courses have been taken charge of by the 
State, and rendered national. The system of railway communica- 
tions has been perfected to a high degree, and the State has 
obtained direct control of almost all the lines. The franchise for 
the House of Commons, and the election of the members, has 
been regulated, and the House of Lords reformed, without, 
however, any elective element being introduced into it. Agri- 
cultural, industrial, and commercial laws have been passed in 
great numbers. The administration of justice has been assured 
by a system of an independent judiciary appointed for life, and 
removable only for cause, and even the great task of legal 
codification has been begun, and is in a fair' way of being 
accomplished. 

Of course, a considerable amount of the strength of the nation 
has been devoted to military armaments. Indeed, the sacrifices 
demanded by the circumstances of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy 
for keeping step in its military organisation with the immense and 
unprecedented development of the armed forces of the neighbour- 
ing empires, have proved a severe strain upon the finances, and 
have taxed to the uttermost the ingenuity of Hungarian statesmen, 
and the forbearance of the taxpayers, in order to be enabled to incur 
permanently the attendant expenses, without the utter ruin of the 
country. Compulsory universal military service for the men of 
all classes has been adopted, and besides the common imperial 
and royal army, the Hungarian Honve'd-army has been Constituted 
and fully equipped. But though nothing has been spared to 
enhance the means of the defence of the monarchy, the even 
balance of receipts and expenditure in the Hungarian budget, 



Hungary. 5 1 

which at first was endangered by the necessity of profuse state- 
investments and by the expenses for the army, has been re-estab- 
lished, and all political parties are unanimous in their determina- 
tion of not allowing it to be disturbed. 

As to social and political tendencies in general, the overwhelm- 
ing majority of the Hungarian people is neither Conservative nor 
Radical, but adheres to tenets which in England would be termed 
the views of moderate Liberalism. The aristocracy has preserved 
a certain amount of prestige, and no one dreams of abolishing the 
House of Lords. The bulk of the political power is in the hands 
of the middle-class landed proprietors, whom the peasantry at 
this day, too, willingly accept as their political leaders. Demo- 
cratical ideas have acquired a permanent hold over the minds, 
but not so far as to obliterate traditions, which in Hungary bear 
no tinge of reactionary associations, but rather point to devotion 
to the cause of national rights. There is no virulent sectarian 
feeling, nor any possibility of the success of ultramontane 
doctrines, Church matters being essentially regarded from the 
standpoint of broad tolerance. In consequence of all these 
circumstances, there is no strongly marked line of division between 
any sections of the people ; and although party feeling at times 
inevitably runs high, the implacable spirit of faction is seldom 
entertained, and then but by very few ; nor is there any important 
body of citizens advocating any doctrines other than those of 
steady and gradual progress in consonance with popular ideas. 

Especially with regard to the foreign policy the whole nation 
is absolutely unanimous in favour of peace, not only for the 
moment, but on principle, so far as possible, for all times. Every 
one in Hungary knows that the country has nothing to gain, and 
much to risk, by any extension or conquest whatever. There can 
be no greater mistake than to suppose that the Hungarian people 
are eager for military glory, or desirous of revenge, because their 
ancestors have fought well on many a field, or because the last 
generation has given brilliant proofs of its valour in the wars of 
past decades. On the contrary, there is probably no nation in 
Europe in which any interference with foreign affairs is less popular. 
Even the occupation of Bosnia was accepted with reluctance, and 
only because it became evident that it was indispensable for the 
defence of the southern frontier, and as a counterpoise to eventual 
offensive plans of Russia, Naturally there is a resolute determin- 
ation throughout the people to be ready for any sacrifice, in order 
to resist aggression, and to maintain the independence and the 



52 National Life and TJiought. 

conditions of the free internal development of the nation. But 
war in any case would be regarded as the last measure of dire 
necessity. The consciousness that the strength of the realm' is 
continually increasing in peace, that the welfare of the people 
requires all the combined efforts of the citizens of Hungary, is 
much too deeply ingrained by the lessons of the past to be 
lightly forgotten or set aside. It is universally felt that Hungary 
is, though quietly, on the road of progress ; and in our days it is 
not the communities which know they are progressive that are 
likely to embark upon perilous adventures, or to jeopardise the 
benefits derived from the harmonious advance of the peaceful 
co-operation of mankind. 



IV. 
GERMANY— POLITICS. 

SIDNEY WHITMAN. 

I FEAR it is only a sad repetition on my part if I begin by 
repeating what has been referred to each Sunday I have 
been present here, namely, our deplorable average ignorance of 
foreign countries in general. But I must even add to that, and 
mention our strange want of interest in other European countries. 

Some years ago an excellent standard work on France, by an 
eminent German author, was translated into English and published 
by one of the leading London publishers. Now, although the 
book was published at a moderate price, although neither the 
author nor the translator received one penny for their work, the 
book at the end of an eight years' sale showed a loss of ^28 on 
the bare costs of publication ! Not a very encouraging speculation 
for author or publisher, you will admit. 

One of the most ambitious of our monthly reviews lately treated 
a book on Germany by a person I am acquainted with to this 
nice little criticism : "A dull book on a dull subject." It is this 
arrogance which, inculcated by a certain section of our snobocracy, 
settles down in wider circles, and does us more harm than making 
us disliked ; it keeps us in ignorance. Though, of course, this is 
an isolated flagrant case, still, if this same author had written a 
book in German on England, although many German reviewers 
might have called the book itself dull, I venture to say that in the 
whole of Germany it would be impossible to find one educated 
critic who could be such a self-satisfied Pharisee as to call the 
subject of England a dull one. 

But it is only fair to state that we are by no means alone in our 
ignorance of our neighbours. I remember seeing the letter of a 
French prisoner during the war of 1870, who was interred in the 
city of Stuttgard, the capital, as you are doubtless aware, of a 
petty German kingdom nearly adjoining France. He wrote home, 
"lama prisoner here in Stuttgard, on the frontier of Russia." 
53 



54 National Life and Thought. 

I have found very strange ideas prevailing in Russia with regard 
to us, and even with regard to Russia's immediate neighbours, the 
Germans. Even the Germans themselves, by far the best 
educated of Europeans, have some very strange notions about 
us, although, as I shall have occasion to notice later on, their 
acquaintance with other nations as a rule is extraordinary. 

But it is not the ignorance of the untutored many that is so 
surprising as that of men in high and responsible positions. It is 
a well-known fact that the belief of Napoleon III., at the 
outbreak of the '70 war, that South Germany would join France, 
a belief shared by a great number of educated Frenchmen, could 
only have been the result of most culpable ignorance. 

At that very time an exceedingly able Frenchman, Baron 
Stoffel, was military attache at the French embassy in Berlin, and 
only too truly gauged the real state of affairs, but he was not 
listened to. Unhappily for France, the politicians of Paris did not 
want enlightenment ; they preferred to follow the blind impulse of 
passion and hatred. 

In our own country, the biographies and memoirs of political 
personages during this century again and again reveal an 
astonishing ignorance of the most simple facts regarding other 
countries — ignorance which, fortunately, has not involved us in 
any of the disastrous consequences above referred to, although 
more than once it has brought us very near to serious international 
complications. 

Against the above, it is pleasing for us to know that the 
authors of the standard works on Germany's two greatest men of 
the last century were Englishmen. Carlyle wrote the History of 
Frederick the Gnat, and G. H. Lewes the best History of Goethe. 
These two works are each accepted in Germany as the standard 
ones in their respective subjects. That shows us what we are 
capable of doing when we set ourselves to familiarise our minds 
with the doings and thought of other countries. 

It is indeed a start the Germans have over us that, firstly, 
through their superior general education, and, secondly, through 
the wonderful hunger for information and knowledge of all kinds 
that pervade that people, from the highest to the humblest, they 
possess an acquaintance with other countries that is perfectly 
unequalled. 

This knowledge has assisted their leaders enormously in shaping 
their policy ; it has assisted the mass of the nation in their 
unceasing efforts to rival other nations, and particularly us, in 



Germany — Politics. 55 

commerce and manufacture, as well as in science ; in fact, in every 
branch of national striving and activity. 

The history of our time affords a very striking instance of this 
intimate knowledge the Germans possess of other countries. 

During the Secession War in America we English, even leading 
politicians and the wealthy classes (I do not like the words upper 
and lower classes), were entirely at sea as to the aspects and 
prospects of that struggle. The masses of this country — to their 
honour be it said — sympathised with the North. The well-to-do 
classes not only sympathised with the South, but, a proof of great 
ignorance of the realities of the struggle, believed in the success 
of the South, and even invested their money in their belief. 

In Germany there was perhaps less barren sympathy spent 
(the Germans, unlike us, are not in the habit of squandering that 
commodity broadcast) ; but every servant girl, every boots at an 
inn had his savings snugly invested in green-backs. Millions and 
millions of money were made in Germany by the population at 
large in this one instance, not to mention what larger capitalists 
made — a striking instance, I hold, of the usefulness of geogra- 
phical and political information about other countries beside our 
own ! 

So much for the drawbacks of ignorance ! Now let me draw 
nearer to the subject of my lecture. 

Of course, in the short time at my disposal, the limits of which 
I promise you not to exceed, it is quite impossible for me to tell 
you much about Germany ; anything, in fact, at all compre- 
hensive. Nor can it be my sole aim to-day to point out to you by 
a series of parallels where the Germans are deficient or where 
they shine to advantage by comparison with us. The most 
I can do is to endeavour to give you some faint notion of 
the general political history that has gradually, after a lapse of 
over a thousand years, brought Germany to the position she 
occupies to-day. 

All I can hope for is, that the subject may interest you suffi- 
ciently to warrant your pursuing it yourselves more fully to some 
purpose. 

The Germans have reaped great benefits from studying us. It 
is high time we endeavoured to gain some more solid advantage 
by studying them and their institutions ; for we have reaped 
many advantages already by so doing. For instance, our wonder- 
ful progress in industrial art and manufacture, our technical 
schools that are springing up everywhere, not to mention our 



56 National Life and Thought. 

greatly improved educational status of late years, is almost solely 
owing to what we have learned of Germany. 

But, believe me, there is still more to be learned from that 
source, particularly in the present day, than is dreamt of in our 
philosophy. I need only refer to the great problems of 
social progress which clamorously await solution with us. 
The study of Germany offers us valuable hints, believe me, in 
this important branch of politics. 

With your kind permission, I should iike to begin by dwelling 
for a few moments on the word politics itself, the one science 
everybody seems to think he understands without having learned it. 

I presume the word itself is derived from the Greek — 7roAis : 
polts = a city. iroXires : polites = a citizen. 

Politics, then, in the original acceptation, might perhaps be 
termed the science that shall treat in a broad aggregate sense of 
the wellbeing and the prosperity and progress of the units of a 
nation — the citizens. 

That must have been in remote ages when civilisation was 
simpler than it is to-day, and when the wellbeing of the citizen 
was, except for occasional interruption by war, famine, or flood, 
the whole concern of the rulers of a people. The greatest 
happiness of the greatest number is an ideal state of things. 

In our time politics has come to mean in its full sense that 
vast and complex science which deals with the balance of power ; 
the supremacy of one people over the other ; the predominance of 
one race over another ; the dominion of one continent, or of one 
small island, over a great part of the inhabited globe. 

That is what politics have come to in our time. Now, although 
it is a wise saying that you should not prophesy unless you know, 
I will venture to prophesy that we have reached an epoch in 
the history of civilisation when politics will have to go back to 
their primitive occupation and busy themselves more earnestly, 
devotedly, and unselfishly with the welfare of the unit — the citizen; 
the poor citizen; the weak, who cannot fight the battle of life 
in a callous world rolling with wealth, and side by side with 
misery, poverty, and degradation. 

And let me tell you, that the first step towards attacking — I 
do not say solving, that is still far distant — this most pressing 
political problem of our time was taken by the late Emperor 
William, assisted by his great minister Bismarck, in his proposals 
for the care of the aged, the sick, and the wounded in the grim 
battle of life — the life of the working man. 



Germany — Politics. 5 7 

The science of politics, as I have endeavoured to point out to 
you, has mighty problems to solve, and yet we are daily in the 
habit of receiving and giving opinions on them with a very slender 
foundation of knowledge or experience. 

What would the specialist think if we were to give a confident 
opinion, and back it by our vote, on an important point of a 
science which we have never specially studied ? And yet we do 
this daily with regard to that most intricate of sciences — the 
science of politics. 

Believe me, the question of home politics requires a close study, 
not only of our own social conditions of life; in our time I 
think, I may safely say, it is also necessary to study and profit by 
the experience gained, through much individual effort and 
suffering, by other countries also. 

But as for some of the broader questions of international 
politics, I make bold to say, it is unlikely for us to have three 
consecutive logical ideas on the subject, unless we are more or 
less familiar with the past history of other countries beside our 
own. 

Now for a glance at the past history of Germany, in order the 
better to understand its product — the present. 

The centre of Europe had been inhabited by a number of 
German tribes even before the time of Csesar, nineteen hundred 
years ago, but it was not until the year 800 of our era that they 
were united into one great empire. 

It was on Christmas Day of the year a.d. 800 that Charle- 
magne, the head of the Franks, was crowned at St. Peter's, in 
Rome, as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, King of Ger- 
many, and Arch Protector of the Christian Faith. 

Thus over two hundred and fifty years before the battle of 
Hastings, from which our modern English history dates, we find 
Germany a great power — the central constituent of the greatest 
power in Europe. 

I must pass over the history of centuries in leaps and bounds, 
merely mentioning that the dissensions of the sons of Charlemagne 
and their successors ultimately resulted in dividing the centre and 
west of Europe into three distinct monarchies : — 

i. France, the least powerful, but the foundation of the 
France we all know. 

2. The kingdom of Lorraine, a great part of which, together 
with Burgundy, is now merged in the France of to-day. 

3. Finally, the kingdom of Germany, ruled by elective monarchs, 



58 National Life and TJiought. 

who at the same time were only crowned as Emperors of the 
Holy Roman Empire, by this fact of being kings of Germany. 

The time at my disposal does not allow me to do more than 
refer to the splendour of the Empire of Germany during the 
Middle Ages, when she was practically supreme over the whole 
of Christianity, except independent little England. The dawn 
of the Reformation found the German King or Roman Emperor 
virtually ruler over a realm on which the sun never set. 

We require an effort of the imagination even to recall that 
there was a time when the ships of the Hansetowns brought over 
unrivalled wealth to their harbours, and had a larger seaboard than 
the whole of England, when Germany was the home of merchant 
princes who helped their monarchs from their own private means, 
when German architecture was most splendid, when German life 
was most luxurious, and German manufacture the most renowned. 

The greatness of Germany found its apogee in Charles V., and 
began to decline immediately after his death. 

Charles the Fifth lived 1520-55, and was cotemporary 
with our Henry VIII. , who, in fact, as well as Francis the First of 
France, both competed for the German crown, which, as I have 
already pointed out, was elective. Charles the Fifth practically 
ruled over the whole of Central Europe, Spain, and those 
parts of America which had been discovered by Spanish naviga- 
tors and explorers. 

France, who has within the memory of living men — though only 
of the very aged — held sway over the whole of Europe, always 
excepting England, was a comparatively small Power in these 
days. But it was not to be very long before she should profit by 
the most potent causes of decay of the German Empire — internal 
rivalries, selfish family policy, and religious dissension — and rise 
to power at its expense. 

And this brings me to that part of the history of Germany — the 
period of the Reformation, and one of its results, the terrible 
Thirty Years' War, without knowing something of which, I think, 
it is almost impossible to form a fair idea of the political aspira- 
tions of Germany of the present day. 

We must bear in mind that it was Germany that bore the 
brunt of the fierce struggle on the Continent against the 
intellectual bondage of the Roman Catholic priesthood of those 
days. 

It was a German peasant's son, Martin Luther — whose birthday 
it is this very day — who stood alone with the Bible in his hands, 



Germany — Politics. 59 

before the Imperial Court at the Diet of Worms, and with the 
prospect of death before him, sooner than yield one inch of 
his convictions, held by these memorable words, " I cannot 
do otherwise. God help me. Amen ! " When warned not to 
go to Worms, for fear of assassination, this mighty peasant's son 
replied, " And yet I will go to Worms if the house-tops were 
crowded with devils." 

This battle cry of conviction, pitted against the power of Rome, 
backed, as was that power, by all the immense might of the 
Catholic Emperor, Charles V., found an echo far and wide among 
the best blood of the Fatherland. Thus began the dawn of a 
new era in Europe, the Reformation initiated in Germany by 
Martin Luther, although it took nearly seventy years to grow strong 
enough to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Charles V.'s suc- 
cessors, backed as they were by the whole weight and power of 
Catholicism. 

This led, in its consequences, to the Thirty Years' War, 
perhaps the most dreadful curse and calamity that ever befell a 
people. In that war the northern and central part of Germany 
fought for thirty long years, at times assisted by the Swedes, the 
French, and other foreigners, against the power of the Houses of 
Austria and Bavaria. 

We in England also have our glorious pages of Protestant 
history connected with the Reformation. We need only recall 
Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada. But with us its 
inception was more of a political and aristocratic character. In 
Germany the dawn of modern times sprang from the very heart 
of the best of the people, and they also it was who suffered most 
in its furtherance. We always had the advantage of being safe on 
this tight little island we love so much. Our country has never 
been invaded, and our population decimated, as was the case in 
Germany during the Thirty Years' War. 

Before that war Germany had a population of over sixteen 
millions ; at its close less than five millions remained. Before 
that war broke out Germany was perhaps the wealthiest country in 
Europe ; at its close the population was on the verge of starvation. 

To give you some faint idea of the horrors of the Thirty Years' 
War, reliable chronicles of the time inform us that towns which 
were only visited by it when it was half over lost seventy-five per 
cent, of their population. 

For years hordes of robbers and thieves, disbanded troops, 
traversed the country from one end to the other, burning and 



60 National Life and Thought. 

stealing and murdering in broad daylight. Prosperous manufac- 
turing towns with 10,000 inhabitants had a population of 500 left 
after the war. Hunger and famine led the people, in many 
instances, to tear the newly-buried from their graves and devour 
them. Disease carried off what the sword had spared. 

When the Peace of 1648 put an end to the war, the country 
itself was one mass of waste, fields not tilled for a generation, 
whole towns swept away, burned or razed to the ground. 

The Peace of Westphalia, as it is known in history, stripped 
Germany of the fruits of centuries of labour and effort, which even 
now she has only partially recovered. 

It left the Protestant part of Germany impoverished, helpless, 
unable to defend itself, in the centre of Europe. France profited 
by a large extension of territory, and from that time onwards found 
it more and more easy to turn German soil into the battlefields of 
her ambitious rulers. 

From that time down to our own, excepting the brief period 
of the French Revolution, when German sovereigns — not their 
people — endeavoured to coerce the French people, and paid 
dearly for it, — from that time the policy of France, the policy, 
in common fairness, it should be said, of French rulers and 
statesmen, not of the French people, has been the spoliation of 
Germany. 

Any student of history can tell you that the whole of Germany 
is marked by mementoes of French battlefields and burnt ruined 
castles. 

If I refer to Frederick the Great, it is to point out that with 
him rose in the last century a Protestant great Power in the north 
of Germany which in our time has crowned the long-longed-for 
edifice of National Unity. 

He it was who, with a population of five millions — one quarter 
more than London to-day — held the determination to stake every- 
thing sooner than run the risk of falling back into the hideous 
political nightmare of the past. 

In England we cannot understand the strength of this resolve ; 
we have practically never known a foreigner on our soil for eight 
hundred years ! But the Germans have hardly known anything 
else ! And I contend, not only that they are justified in holding 
on to the armaments ; but, I maintain, their whole history proves 
— even that of the last twenty years as well — that the Germans are 
a peaceful, non-aggressive people. 

You may answer to this, that their government has lately 



Germany — Politics. 6 1 

shown itself occasionally aggressive with regard to the African 
Colonies ! 

True, perhaps ; but what a paltry matter that is compared to 
the enormous annexations of territory we have accomplished 
during the last ten years ! 

And yet, even those small, but, I hold, perfectly justifiable, 
efforts to have colonies of their own, have met with great opposi- 
tion from the German people. Believe me, the Germans do not 
aspire to rival us beyond the seas ; and if they did, they could 
not ! No more than, I honestly believe, they will ever beat us in 
the long run in commerce with all their cheapness. 

But I do not say we should indulge in any sentimental feeling 
with regard to them. If Germany trespasses on our interests, let 
us defend them ; but do not let us cant over it. But England 
and Germany have every interest to remain at peace ; and thus, 
without any entangling alliance, they are both at one in the 
interests of peace as against all peace-breakers, and so will 
remain. 

Further than this, I say we should try and inform ourselves as 
to the history and the qualities of a great nation, whose interests, 
whereas they nowhere seriously clash with our own, go hand in 
hand with them in many important matters. 

We should try to look at such a nation, which is bound to 
play a great part socially, with judgment intellectually, as well as 
politically, unbiassed, without favour, but without prejudice, in 
order, if possible, to gain some benefit to ourselves, some ex- 
perience in many important matters, social, intellectual, and 
political, by so doing. 

How comes it that we find the united armies of Russia, Austria, 
and France, representing a population of over a hundred millions, 
at bay more or less for seven years ? 

And when he passed away, it was not long before the greatest 
soldier of modern times, an avenging Attila in modern form, I 
mean Napoleon the First, appeared on the scene ; and profiting 
by the dissensions and incapacity, yea, even the want of character 
of German rulers, again turned Germany into the battlefield of 
Europe, and preyed on the vitals of the impoverished German 
people for nearly twenty years ! 

The history of the last two hundred years, and the sufferings the 
people of Germany underwent all through that long period, explains 
the readiness of Germans to-day to bear any taxation, to put up 
with any strain, even poverty if you will, and to stand and fall 



62 National Life and Thought. 

with their Emperor to retain the position they have bought with 
their blood. 

If I have especially dwelt on the misery revealed in the history 
of the last two hundred years, it is because it affords an explanation 
of the central idea that governs the politics of Germany. If 
we find such difficulty, as we undoubtedly do, in appreciating that 
main principle, may it not be more or less in consequence of 
some such frame of mind as this : — If a nation prospers by different 
methods to our own, we do not regard them exactly so much with 
envy as with a certain diffident incredulous irritability that their 
prosperity must be " delusive," as it has not been secured by our 
own hallowed, patent process ? 

The success of Germany in our time can be distinctly traced to 
the initiative of great men. Our democratic age does not believe 
in great men ; it is rather inclined to sneer at them — at least at its 
own great men, who have yet to face the verdict of posterity. I 
would venture to say there is a time for great men ; everything in 
its proper time; great men, majorities, and ballot boxes; but 
nothing final, for all illnesses — like a patent medicine — in this 
great world of ours, in which nothing is final but change. 

Our attention is drawn to the affairs of other nations. We 
know little of them. We have a hazy idea that they are some- 
how not so free as we are ; hence, we take our stand by the magic 
word " Liberty " — itself only a means to an end — and judge others 
by our standard of that magic quantity ! 

It is perhaps true that we do enjoy the greatest amount of 
political liberty of any country, consequently some of us think we 
are in a position to look down upon others and to pity them, 
their status and their aims, forthwith ! 

I am sorry to say that I am unable to endorse this view, much 
less to believe in its finality. And if I had not restricted the 
limits of my lecture to-day to the politics of Germany — after all, 
only one phase of a nation's life — I think I could easily prove to 
you that, as far as the comparative amount of happiness is con- 
cerned, that is to be found here and in Germany, we are by no 
means in the position to pity our neighbours or look down upon 
them. 

I am sorry to say that the frame of mind which enables a man 
to call out, " I thank my stars that I am an Englishman," is one I 
cannot share. I hold that not only to be a reprehensible senti- 
ment, savouring of the Pharisee of the New Testament, but one 
precluding any possible fair estimate of other countries. In this 



Germany — Politics. 6 3 

case it is doubly so, at least from my point of view, holding, as I 
do, that although we owe our first affections to the land of our 
birth, we do not owe it blind idolatry, which prevents the critic 
recognising where there is something beyond our seas to admire 
and to learn from. 

I hope I cede to no man in my pride at what England and 
Englishmen have achieved and are achieving, but there my 
feelings stop ; for if they did not, I should consider myself 
perfectly unfitted to address you on the subject before us. In 
fact, I might never have taken the trouble to study it ! 

But you may say, Yes, that is all very well, but you cannot deny 
that it is a sad state of things that, with all admitted prosperity 
and military success of Germany, there should be so little liberty 
there, that thousands and thousands of emigrants flee their native 
shores year by year in order to escape the hated conscription. 

Well, I do deny the latter part of that contention. I even am 
of opinion that it is a libel on the manhood of Germany ! I even 
believe that, without any conscription at all, emigration would be 
just as great, for it is the natural consequence of that mysterious 
law that seems to govern mankind since thousands of years to 
steer from east to west in search of fortune ! 

It is disproved by the thousands and thousands of Germans 
who hurried back to their native shores at the trumpet call of war 
in the memorable year 1870 ! It is indirectly disproved by 
analogy by the enormous emigration from Ireland ! Is that caused 
by the law of compulsory military service ? 

Now, as regards individual political liberty, the contention 
must be admitted to be partially true. But what does it amount 
to ? Everything gained on earth is the result, it would seem, of 
a compromise. 

Must we not ourselves admit that, notwithstanding our boasted 
political liberty, we have a greater amount of social slavery, of 
drunkenness, of bigotry, of human misery to show than military- 
ridden Germany. 

If you will not admit it, I pledge you my word of honour it is 
so, nevertheless. 

The facts are simply these : The Germans had to accept 
national independence — the first condition of national life — 
whence and under what conditions it was possible. If they had 
waited until public opinion — I do not deny that public opinion 
was partially for it — a free press and the ballot-box had beaten off 
their enemies and cemented their hopeless internal differences, 



64 National Life and Tkouglit. 

surrounded by enemies, as they always were, they might have 
waited in vain until the day of judgment ! 

Strong men had to come, but, mind, honest, fearless,' self- 
sacrificing men ! And they came, and led, and conquered the 
right of a great nation to regulate its own affairs, without let or 
hindrance, from outside. 

These advantages must remain ; their comparatively trivial 
drawbacks must yield gradually to the spirit of the time. You 
must remember in judging Germany that she has only just 
emerged from a life struggle for her very existence as an inde- 
pendent united nation ! 

What are twenty years in the life of a nation ? A day, a week 
in the life of a man ! 

Germany in some senses can only fairly be compared to 
England as it was centuries ago, and that comparison involves no 
disadvantage to her. She will soon be found in touch with, if 
not ahead of her time, believe me ! 

It is the policy of Germany to-day to retain the fruits of the 
sacrifices that have been brought. These fruits are necessary 
for her existence as a strong, independent, peace-loving Power in 
the centre of Europe ; she does not wish to add to these fruits 
from the mere lust of conquest. 

At present, it must be admitted, there are many inconveniences 
to be met in Germany that jar on our unaccustomed nerves. 

The officials are in many cases arbitrary, and inclined to think 
themselves the masters and the public their servants. These are 
disadvantages, I admit; but against these, and sundry others, 
believe me, there are many things to be met with in Germany for 
which we might well envy the Germans, police-ridden, military- 
ridden as they are ! 

If they enjoy less political liberty than we, they suffer less from 
heartless social tyranny, from ostracism of the poor, than we do. 
If their educated men frequent the churches less than ours do, 
on the other hand, when you enter a German church you will 
find the rich sitting beside the poor. 

If their system of administration is somewhat cumbersome, 
irksome, and inquisitorial, on the other hand, the Government of 
Germany protects the poor from the unprincipled adulteration 
of articles of food, which is the curse of Italy, England, and 
America. 

Imprisonment and enormous fines await the adulterators in the 
Fatherland; here in the land of liberty an eminent statesman 



Germany — Politics. 65 

once told Englishmen that, according to these wondrous laws of 
supply and demand, adulteration is a mild form of competition ! 
A nice creed for the working-man with £1 a week and a family 
to console himself with when he is half-poisoned with whiskey 
adulterated with sulphuric acid. 

I will only add, for your information, that many of the stoutest 
planks of your Radical platform — a long way off practical applica- 
tion in this country — are already accomplished facts in poor 
Germany. For instance, local government, which exists all over 
Germany in excellent working order, side by side with, but subor- 
dinate to, the Imperial Parliament at Berlin. 

I fancy I could tell you a deal more -about Germany that would 
be new to you, but it is slightly outside the scope of my lecture 
of to-day. 

With your permission, however, I should like to conclude with 
a word regarding the general acceptation of militarism and 
war — a subject we cannot overlook in dealing with political 
Germany. 

We may like it or not, but the sad truth it is, nevertheless, that 
mankind is always at war. 

The battle of life is one of the inexorable conditions of 
existence all the world over in the whole animal kingdom — man- 
kind at its head included. 

And, among mankind, let me tell you, there are few more per- 
sistent fighters than the entire Anglo-Saxon race. 

In fact, we who now indulge in dreams of peace, we owe our 
very existence to our capacity for fighting and beating our 
enemies all over the world. 

The Americans, our kinsmen, are at present silently at war with 
the North American Indians ; we ourselves are at war with the 
Maoris in New Zealand, the aborigines in Australia, who, all in 
measurable distance of time from now, will as surely be cut off 
from the face of the earth, as the extinct bird, the dodo • as surely 
as if they were cut off by the sword in one single night. 

The ordeal of battle is by no means the most terrible one 
humanity has to face, particularly if it has to be faced in an 
honourable cause by a whole nation in arms ; the rich fighting 
in the ranks side by side with the poor ; both equal, under the 
directing hand of genius. And the nation which shirks this 
ordeal when its honour and its existence are at stake is sure to go 
towards decay and ultimate obliteration. 

Is that not war we see in our midst ; the grim fight of the 

E 



66 National Life and Thought. 

dockers for a bare existence ; the constant fight of the Sheffield 
grinders with death, which vanquishes them invariably before the 
prime of life ; the struggle of the stokers on board the American 
liners, which finishes them in three to five years. Go into the 
slums of Salford and Manchester, and look at the population 
there, and come back and tell me whether you have not seen 
one of the most hideous struggles amidst dirt, improvidence, 
and poverty ? 

Let us endeavour to see things as they are, not as an over- 
excited, though kindly, imagination would picture them to us. 
We are told of the cruel wrong of taking men away from the 
blessed productive labour of peace ! I cannot see much blessing 
or much happiness in a family during peace starving on ten 
shillings a week. 

It is, doubtless, a grand achievement of our time that the 
desire to arbitrate should have arisen, even when only compara- 
tively trivial interests and imaginary honour are at stake; but, 
believe me, as surely as we owe our national and racial pre- 
dominance almost exclusively to successful fighting, so surely will 
it ever be in the future, that we must be prepared to back our 
arguments, in the last resort, by the sword. 

The lessons of history teach us that it is imperative that a 
nation should be able to fight. Humanity teaches us to be 
merciful and just in the hour of victory. 

To those who look at politics without illusions, and yet with a 
full belief in the onward progress of humanity, there can be few 
more cheering and consoling items in our time than the history 
of the great American Secession War of 1 86 1-68, in which, 
although the passions were inflamed as much as ever in times 
gone by, yet in the moment of victory a new spirit of mercy and 
forgiveness came over the victors, that would not allow a drop of 
blood to be spilt, but sought to heal the wounds an unavoidable 
struggle had struck. 

Why is America at peace now ? Because she is humanitarian ? 
No ; because nobody dare touch her ! 

We hear of a war that throws a nation, and with it civilisation, 
fifty years back. 

But this is not always the case. Even an unsuccessful war has 
before now been an admitted benefit, in some instances, to a 
nation, let alone a legitimate and successful one. Witness the 
case of Austria in 1866. That war acted on Austria like a storm 
that swept away the miasmas of stagnation. Austria since that 



Germany — Politics. 6j 

period has become one of the most liberally constituted countries 
in Europe, if that is of any benefit to a nation. 

Frederick the Great, on his return to Berlin after the Seven 
Years' War, could not restrain his tears when he heard the loyal 
cheers of the half-starved and beggared population that had 
suffered so much. And yet, who shall deny to-day that those 
sufferings of the Seven Years' War, as well as later those of the 
War of Liberation against the First Napoleon, steeled the nerves 
of the nation to do and die in our time ? 

And to-day, if you read the newspapers, you will find that every- 
where the German Emperor goes he is received with enthusiasm. 
If you think that the poor enslaved Germans cheer their chains, 
you are very much mistaken. Whatever socialistic malcontents 
and opponents of every form of royalty may think, yet among the 
vast majority of the nation he is immensely popular, because he 
represents the national aspirations — if not all of them, at least the 
principal ones. When he said that eighteen army-corps would 
bite the dust before the ground which had been won by such 
sacrifices should be yielded, he gave vent to a sentiment which we 
Englishmen can only understand, if we imagine the eventuality 
of Ireland being threatened by a foreign Power ! 

To hear people tell about the peace of the world, the sympathy 
between peoples, etc., does credit to the illusions of those that 
propound these ideas, and credit to the heart of those that take 
them up and applaud them. But from the point of view of the 
student of politics, the hope of practical realisation of these senti- 
ments has little basis in the history of the world ! 

I think it would be a little more natural to look for more sym- 
pathy between ourselves, as man to man, as class to class, before 
we go far afield in our desire to embrace the whole world in one 
bond of union and cheap sympathy. 

We allow our politicians to make party capital out of the 
wrongs and sufferings of nations and races at the other end of 
Europe. I have never yet seen any benefit accrue to my country- 
men from such doings ! 

Believe me, there is more real unhappiness, more hopeless 
misery to be met with within a mile of London Bridge than in 
the whole of Asiatic Turkey ! 

Let us drop our artificial sympathy with the sufferings of 
others. We cannot afford it. Let us strive to find out where 
there is something to admire in others ; where they are ahead of 
us ; where they are better off than we. And if we can gain some 



68 National Life and Thought. 

of the advantages others possess without their disadvantages, let 
us make up our minds that we will have them too, or know the 
reason why ! 

Before we indulge in dreams of cosmopolitan sympathy, our 
aristocracy, and particularly our middle classes that are led by 
the clergy, must get rid of the suspicion of looking upon poverty 
as next door to a crime. 

Our democracy must get rid of that " envy and hatred " which 
it vents "sometimes" against those who do not share its views. 

Listen to the tone of some of our democratic organs against the 
so-called military despotism of Europe. 

What do they usually know of those countries, and their vital 
necessities ? Very often but little, I fear. 

Then let us strive and add to our knowledge all round, so that 
we may be better able each of us to fulfil that little part in the 
battle of life unconsciously assigned to each of us, namely, each 
to contribute, according to his opportunities, his mite towards the 
solution of that great social political problem — to leave the world 
a little better than we found it ! 



V. 
GERMAN CULTURE. 

SIDNEY WHITMAN. 

IF I venture to submit a few words on German Culture for 
your consideration, it is that I was partly educated in that 
country, and have been lastingly impressed by much I saw and 
learnt whilst there. 

I shall not be surprised if you even opine that my picture of 
German culture be rather a favourable one. If so, I can only 
say I am dealing with the spirit of things, and not with any 
preference for the nation as individuals. 

There seems to be little doubt that a certain unpopularity of 
Germany has of late years made itself felt, not only in this country ; 
but history fails to show that temporary popularity, much less 
unpopularity, as distinct from the verdict of posterity, has much to 
do with the merits or demerits of a people. Every nation in its 
turn comes in for a gust of international dislike. The weaker a 
power, the less likely she is to earn foreign animosity; but that 
does not prove her to be any the better on that account. 

About the year 1848, Lord Palmerston, our Foreign Secretary, 
was so disliked all over the Continent, that they used to sing a 
ditty in the streets of Vienna ending — 

" And if the devil has a son, 
He surely must be Palmerston." 

Yet we are not told that this did Lord Palmerston any harm in 
his own country. 

Now, as regards the partial unpopularity of Germany of to-day, 
all I can say is that, as a student of the German nation, I do not 
join in that feeling. Not that I deny there may be some cause 
for it ; but whatever it may be, I do not let it affect my judg- 
ment of the nation, which I respect, nor of its culture, which I 
greatly admire. 

If the Germans try to beat us in politics, my common sense 
69 



JO National Life and Thought. 

tells me that we, as a great power, are perfectly well able to 
stand up and defend our own interests if they are trespassed upon. 

As for the poor German princes whom we think fit to call over 
to our shores, and endow with money and position, and who at 
our Radicals are constantly railing, my common sense again tells 
me that it is we who are to blame for being so liberal, not they 
for accepting our bounty. I know of one or two impecunious 
English noblemen who pass through the bankruptcy court with 
amiable regularity, and who would only be too delighted to go 
and live in clover in Germany, if that country were so foolish 
as to pay them to do so. I also know of a few German 
princes who are almost as wealthy as our wealthiest peers, and 
who would not care to come over here and accept our favours. 

As for German competition in the labour markets, there are 
undoubtedly pushing traders in Germany as there are here. 
Well, competitors in trade are never congenial acquaintances. 
But as for the Germans underselling us, and living on nothing in 
doing so, I do not believe these are the causes that need make 
us fear German competition. I believe there are as many poor 
Englishmen at the present time forced to live on starvation wages 
as any German. No, believe me, the main cause of German 
success in the labour markets is to be found in the superior 
culture and education of the masses ! 

I cannot hope to prove that to you to-day ; I can only ask you 
to accept it at present on trust, to be proved, perhaps, with your 
kind permission, on some future occasion. All I can do to-day 
is to draw your attention to some features of German culture 
which I think may interest you, and to be impartial in doing so. 

In the first place, the very subject of my lecture, " Culture," 
almost precludes an exact division of light and shade, of 
advantages and drawbacks. These are to be found everywhere and 
in everything. We do not all believe in the Old Testament notion 
of the " chosen people." It smacks too much of privilege and 
favouritism for our taste. It seems more natural to believe that 
every people has its special failures and its compensating virtues. 
And if it happens to be my set task to-day to illustrate a bright 
side of the German people, that does not mean that you cannot 
find the same amount of envy and uncharitableness in Germany 
as we can show of cant and hypocrisy in England. 

But we do not analyse shadows when we are dwelling on the 
characteristics of light. And those must be left to take care 
of themselves to-day, even at the risk of your fancying that I ignore 



German Culture. yi 

their existence. It is well known that in Berlin and elsewhere 
the struggle of life is becoming as severe as with us. In Germany, 
as elsewhere, there are social problems to be solved which 
culture alone can neither solve nor put out of sight. But I 
believe firmly that there are hardly any political or social 
problems the solution of which will not be ultimately facilitated 
for any nation by widespread education and an exalted standard 
of thinking. 

Culture, in its higher sense, has hitherto with us been the 
privilege of the few. I maintain that in the future many of its 
attainable features must become accessible to all. For when I 
speak of the adhere of a nation, I do not mean an artificial 
refinement, nor do I refer to a privileged, cultured class. I 
refer to the thought and aspirations of many millions, including 
the best of all classes. 

In this sense, I look upon "culture" as the very sun that 
brightens the daily life of a nation. And if on this point I am 
guilty of partisanship for Germany, it springs from the belief that 
I have sometimes seen more true dignity of life and enjoyment 
among the population there than here, strange as this statement 
may appear to you. 

Only the other day I was talking to a friend, a hard-headed, 
matter-of-fact London solicitor. He said to me that he could 
not understand why I often seemed so favourably impressed by 
Germany. " Well," I replied, " you yourself have often been 
there. Tell me honestly, where has it struck you that there seems 
to be more happiness among the people — here or there ? " His 
immediate reply was, " Undoubtedly in Germany." " Well, then," 
I answered, "that is my justification." 

Let me take an incident at random from Christmas time in 
Germany as evidence of what I mean. The Standard contained 
a telegram the other day from Berlin stating that over 400,000 
Christmas trees had been disposed of there. That means practically 
a Christmas tree in every family in the capital. That means a 
gathering of good-will and an exchange of presents, however 
trifling, in every family, down to the humblest working-man of 
the community. 

Surely no insignificant sign that, notwithstanding blood-tax and 
heavy money taxation, there exists in Germany a universal feeling 
of culture in a family sense, and the means to gratify it in an 
almost unparalleled proportion. If I have admired the beauties 
of nature in Germany, the culture of the educated ; if I have 



J 2 National Life and Thought. 

participated in the enjoyments of the wealthy, as well as in 
the simpler pastimes of the humble, my enjoyment has seldom 
been spoilt by the sight of the hard, cold, cheerless life of ■ the 
many. And I adhere to this, notwithstanding the important 
fact that the masses in this country hardly pay any direct taxes at 
all, whereas they are almost always paying petty taxes in Germany. 

These may seem strong statements to you, who mostly only 
hear of foreign countries as so much behind our own, and of their 
people as only deserving pity in their thraldom; but what is 
more, I am morally certain, that if you had lived in Germany or 
France, and knew these countries as I fancy I do, you would 
share my views. I have found plenty of travelled Englishmen 
who feel even stronger on this subject than I do. 

And now I must ask your indulgence for the apparent egoism 
of these few preliminary personal remarks. But I judged them 
necessary, in order to enable you the better to understand the drift 
of my lecture. For it is really no easy matter to give you even a 
faint idea of German culture in the sixty minutes at my disposal. 

To begin with, what is culture? Like most terms of far- 
reaching application, it is somewhat difficult to give a concise 
definition of it. The word itself would seem to mean simply the 
process of cultivation ; something that is cultivated; a soil that has 
been ploughed, that is eager to produce. The Germans even use 
the very term Kultur, as applied equally to a high state of mental 
education and also to a tilled soil — Culturboden. And I think you 
will find the same wide application of the word in some English 
dictionaries. 

And yet that will not give us a sufficient indication of the 
word's meaning. For the Americans, with all their excellent 
school training, are in some respects less cultured than the 
uneducated Italians. The French, again, although vastly inferior 
to the Germans in book knowledge, are, from some points of view, 
perhaps more cultured than the Germans. 

The explanation of the above contradiction must be sought and 
will be found in the fuller explanation of the meaning of the term 
itself. Culture does not stand alone for the amount of exact 
knowledge or talents we possess, be they artistic, practical, or 
scientific. It includes in its significance the feeling for refine- 
ment, for the fitness of things in general. Thus a man who. 
with imperfect mental attainments, combines a refinement of 
feeling for the sufferings or the wants or susceptibilities of others 

a fulness of true sympathy, as opposed to a false, hysterical, 



German Culture. 73 

diseased sentiment — is in many respects more cultured than a 
walking encyclopaedia of knowledge, combined with coarseness of 
manner and feeling. 

Self-respect, in its best sense, is part of all true culture, even 
when possessed by the unlettered. And this speciality of culture 
will be found most prevalent in those countries in which the 
dignity of labour is most generally recognised. That rare quality, 
tact of the heart, which enables us to respect ourselves in showing 
a proper regard for the feelings of others, is a part of true culture 
that may be learnt by mixing with the world, but which is ever 
best exemplified when it is inborn. I have seen it in some of very 
humble station, and found it wanting in many holding exalted 
position. 

Again, a proper respect for women is a special feature of true 
culture, and one in which, I make bold to say, Englishmen are 
perhaps second only to our own race beyond the seas. 

Another point of culture, in which the long stability of our 
political system has undoubtedly given us a striking pre-eminence, 
is the great respect we have in England for established law. This 
feeling extends even towards the law's humblest representative. 
The moral ascendency of the English policeman I hold to be 
unparalleled in the world. 

Another point, which I venture to think is not unconnected 
with our prosperous and great national history, is a certain 
generosity and breadth of mind we often meet with in England 
in judging others. I may be biassed in this, but it has struck 
me in comparison with the rapidity and ease with which I 
have found slander and misrepresentation travel and propagate 
in some other countries. Bigotry and intolerance, class pride 
and class selfishness, are incompatible with true culture, which 
itself is synonymous with a broad and generous cast of mind. 

Again, the mere jQ s. d. utilitarian, whose narrow mental horizon 
does not enable him to discern even the indirect money value of 
knowledge, let alone its power of adding to the dignity of our 
life, he will pooh-pooh our ideas of culture, and simply ask, " What 
is your bank balance?" "Very little." "Well, then, you are a 
pauper, with all your culture." 

Such was the frame of mind of an otherwise worthy citizen, to 
whom a friend of mine showed a complimentary letter he had 
been honoured with by Mr. Gladstone, whose birthday it is to-day. 
Now, I think you will agree with me, that whatever political 
party we may belong to, we may look upon a personal compli- 



74 National Life and Thought. 

ment from an intellectual giant such as Mr. Gladstone as a high 
honour. But our Avorthy citizen thought otherwise, and merely 
asked, t: Is there a cheque in the letter ? " This man was slightly 
wanting in the sense of reverence — an important one in all 
culture. 

It is true the apostles of culture do not often amass riches. 
The late Mr. Matthew Arnold died the other day little better than 
a pauper, from a banker's point of view. He did not write books 
that were read by the million. But the day may come when such 
books, though on a broader basis, will touch the minds of the 
million as Dickens' works now touch their heart ; and then it 
will be plainly seen that the one goes hand in hand with the 
other — the heart with the mind — in educating us to feel the beauty 
and dignity of life on this earth. However, I will not tax your 
attention any farther by vague generalisations, but rather try and 
make my meaning clear by explanation as I go along. 

To begin with, I think I can discern three distinct, broad lines 
of culture — that of the mind, that of the heart, and, thirdly, the 
culture of the body. Now, taking the last first, if we accept the 
splendid advertisements of " Pears' Soap," of " Sunlight Soap," 
of " Brooke's Soap" that " won't wash clothes," and many others, 
as any criterion to go by, we must either be dreadfully in want of 
soap, or we really ought to be bodily the cleanest nation on the 
face of the earth ; and if you believe it, no word of mine shall 
cast a doubt on your faith. 

In that other important branch of body-culture — namely, our 
outdoor sports, and hygienic science in general — I think it is less 
open to doubt that the Anglo-Saxon race is really the first in the 
world. Indeed, the indomitable spirit of emulation and rivalry 
shown in the practice of athletics is not unconnected with our 
mighty history of colonisation and world-power. But as I do not 
believe in the uncompensated superiority of any people all round, 
so also I cannot help remarking that the prevalence of the spirit 
of gambling and betting is a direct outcome of some forms of sport, 
and goes far to moderate our complacency. 

As for the culture of the heart, the splendid record of individual 
unselfish effort for the good of others that is stamped on every 
page in our national history, the charity of the wealthy, the 
devotion of the humble, — these show us what our race is capable 
of, and make me feel it unnecessary to stray at large under this 
heading in order to point a moral or adorn a tale. 

Now, let us note what the great Russian novelist Turgenieff has 



German Culture. 75 

to say on German Culture. He expresses his views very unmis- 
takably in a letter dated 1 8th August 1862: — " When you leave 
muddy Poland and arrive on German soil, you find yourself, as it 
were, in a radiant land. The poor Slavonic race ! We blame 
Hegel for having assigned to the Slavs a less illustrious mission 
than to the German family. Alas ! every one can convince himself 
that Hegel was right. Civilisation is worked out, not by ideas, 
but by manners. Yes, here es wird behaglich zu muthe (a sense of 
comfort comes over me) ; this is mainly because my intellectual 
development is associated with Germany. Not to mention philo- 
sophy and poetry, even German humour is after my own heart. 
Alas ! our Russian so-called education disposes us to imitate 
rather French morals, and the more is the pity. Moreover, what 
pleases us in French education are its bad sides — notably its 
licentiousness and its slipshod ways ; it is mostly these things 
that the Russian selects and assimilates. The German spirit, 
which is made up wholly of discipline, is not in harmony with our 
nature. What a pity that Russian tourists merely pass through 
Berlin, without entering into the spirit of the place ! Only good 
schools can cure us of our superficiality." 

It is to some aspects of the German spirit that I wish to draw 
attention, and particularly to one special feature thereof — the 
unconscious endeavour to make the everyday aspect of life less 
cold and cheerless, particularly to those who are not blessed with 
wealth and other worldly advantages. This special German 
feature seems to me to be a joint product of heart and mind, 
acting for generations past in rare unison, in a direction already 
marked out for us, although on somewhat different lines, by 
the ancient Greeks, the most cultured people of antiquity. 

That truly great and good man, Abraham Lincoln — in my 
humble opinion one of the most cultured men we have seen in 
our time — had a jocular habit of illustrating his most important 
utterances by the following playful words : " Now, let me tell you 
a little story." 

Among my memories of Germany, few have retained such a firm 
hold of my thoughts as a little woodcut taken out of an American 
illustrated paper. It represented an elderly German citizen in 
bed, reading by the light of an enormously long candle, stuck into 
a small shaky candlestick. The bedcover, one of those dreadful 
feather-bed counterpanes to be met with perhaps only in Germany, 
reached from his chin down to somewhere a little below his knees. 
Underneath this realistic sketch the following words were printed ; 



7 6 National Life and TJwught. 

"The candle too long, the bedclothes too short ; but what does it 
matter as long as you are happy ? " 

It seems to me there is a world of fact and of food for thought 
in that little sketch and in those accompanying words. In the 
first place, note the small, shaky candlestick. Could there be a 
more apt illustration of the one great drawback of much we might 
otherwise admire in Germany — namely, the want of practical 
ability in everyday matters ? — one of the qualities the possession of 
which has long given the Anglo-Saxon people such a start in the 
race for wealth. I never remember seeing a properly-fitting candle- 
stick in Germany, and it is only lately that German beds are 
anything like the practical coaxers to rest that we are accustomed 
to here. The political misery and the poverty of the past have 
undoubtedly had a deal to do with the neglect of this depart- 
ment of culture — namely, the culture of " comfort." But in this 
respect Germany has made great strides within the last twenty years. 

Now, coming back to my woodcut, let me draw your attention 
to the fact that this man is in bed — at first sight a trivial circum- 
stance, but in reality a most instructive one. He might be sitting 
up and drinking, or, worse still, be out at some music hall or 
public-house. Not that this German is a henpecked husband, 
who dare not go out and enjoy himself; or that he, like an English 
blue-ribbonite, never indulges in malt liquor. Far from it. He 
polishes off his mug of beer at his favourite beer-house, where the 
humblest, and some of the high and well-born too, mingle and 
behave themselves. He whiles away an hour there in the 
congenial company of the educated men of the town, for he is no 
psalm-singer, who denies himself the harmless enjoyments of life. 
But he keeps early hours, he goes to bed at a reasonable time — in 
fact, he is a moral man. 

Oh, you may say, it is late, and the public-houses are closed ; 
and there you would be sadly mistaken. In the first place, there 
are no public-houses in Germany. The culture of the German 
people would prevent their patronising such dens of adulteration 
and cold-blooded drink. In the second place, there are no 
Draconic early-closing laws in Germany. It is even a great 
question whether the politically down-trodden German would 
tamely submit to such tyranny, let alone local option or total 
prohibition. Only some years ago there was a riot, attended with 
bloodshed, merely because of an attempt to raise the price of 
beer. It would want a bold legislator indeed to dare to tell the 
humblest German to give up his harmless glass of beer, and turn 



German Culture. jj 

out at the strike of the clock into the street like so many children. 
But as there is no coercion, so there is little drunkenness, 
although no teetotalism, and that notwithstanding the unlimited 
hours the beer-houses are allowed to remain open. The case of 
Germany goes to show, that it is self-respect, and not prohibition 
or enforced pledges of teetotalism, that will make a nation sober. 

As I said before, the subject of my sketch is in bed, and even 
risking to set fire to the bed-clothes and to catch rheumatism in 
his lower extremities, in order to improve his mind before courting 
the slumbers of the just ; for I feel convined that he is reading 
some instructive book — perhaps Darwin's Origin of the Species. 
Yes, it is this wonderful thirst for useful knowledge which 
distinguishes the whole German people, and mentally ennobles 
them. This is one of the most striking features of their wide- 
spread culture ; for the Germans look upon intellectual know- 
ledge as something almost divine, something to be regarded with 
reverence, to be worshipped for its own sake. 

It is this trait in the national character which explains the 
extraordinary influence the poet Goethe, as a man and as a thinker, 
has exercised over the minds of his countrymen. And here the 
Germans possess a great advantage over us, who unfortunately 
know next to nothing of the personality of our greatest countryman, 
Shakespeare. We can only judge what an immense loss this is to 
English culture, when we know what Goethe's personality has been 
to Germany. 

Take away the poet Goethe, who, perhaps, of all moderns, has 
best rendered and revived the Grecian ideals of the beauty and 
dignity of life, and there remains the intellectual character of the 
man, to whom every fruit from the tree of knowledge and truth 
was a prize to live for, and the search of which was its own 
reward. " Oh," he once exclaimed, " that I could come again in a 
hundred years, if only to see and enjoy the sight of the progress 
mankind will have made in that time along the path of truth." 
And these words strike the key-note of the best culture of 
Germany — the love of scientific truth, of mankind, the unselfish 
interest in its progress and happiness. 

No field of learning but what Goethe strove to work in it ; not 
in a spirit of vanity, or with a feverish longing for worldly honour 
and the noisy recognition of the multitude ; no, from pure love of 
truth itself, of which our own poet Keats so aptly says — ■ 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty ; 
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 



-A 



78 National Life and Thought. 

Goethe, as is well known, foreshadowed the conclusions since 
drawn from Darwin's works, which in our time have revolutionised 
our conception of cosmogony. It was Goethe, the friend of 
princes, who, in the character of Faust, teaches the highest 
philosophy to all— namely, that happiness is only to be found in 
the fulfilment of duty, useful work done for the benefit of all. 
Faust, after passing through every stage of worldly power and 
enjoyment without obtaining rest, at last finds contentment as a 
tiller of the soil ! But even where his efforts were incomplete 
or unproductive, his example has remained a constant spur to 
the intellect of Germany. Well might such a man exclaim, 
without vanity, on being created a noble: "The dignity of 
nobility has nothing surprising in store for me ; I was not con- 
scious of an addition to my standing." For him there could 
only exist the truly aristocratic distinctions of mind and character. 

To Goethe is in great part owing the wonderful appreciation of 
Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Burns, and Byron we find all over 
Germany. Of Shakespeare he once said, "When I think of 
Shakspeare, I cannot understand how I can have the audacity to 
attempt anything." And yet Goethe knew that he, too, was 
destined to be immortal ; but, like all true greatness, it is ever 
found hand in hand with the recognition of kindred genius. 
It is reserved for the Liliputian to cavil at those whose size 
makes him doubly conscious of his littleness. 

I have travelled much in Germany, and I think you would be 
surprised if I could tell you of the widespread admiration and 
knowledge to be met with everywhere of our English literature, 
and of our English greatness of thought and action. The 
Germans stand first in their eager recognition of the best 
in foreign countries. We might well learn from them in this. 
A German schoolmaster once told me : " I always urge my pupils 
to read Sir Walter Scott. In the first place, he is a glorious 
novelist ; and then the perusal of his works inculcates a nobility of 
aim and feeling that are only too rare nowadays in this money- 
making age." 

Shakespeare is known to all in the Fatherland, and I might 
even say the same of Dickens — that great poet of the human heart, 
as an eminent German man of letters once styled him to me. 
The other day I read in the Times (Nov. iS, 1889) respecting 
German theatres: "The stage interpretation of Shakespeare is 
rapidly rising to a higher level in Germany even than in England." 
How neatly put, " even than in England " ! I cannot under- 



German Culture. yg 

stand these circumlocutions, when it is so easy to speak the truth. 
Why not state the plain truth — namely, that the stage interpretation 
of Shakespeare in Germany is not "rapidly rising," but rather that 
it lias long been far above that, " even " in England ? There are 
at least a dozen towns in Germany in which you may any day 
witness not only as good representations of Shakespeare as our 
best, but many masterpieces of Shakespeare that are never 
performed in England at all, because they don't pay. But they 
pay in poor, military-ridden Germany, because the Germans love 
Shakespeare. The mind of Shakespeare' is one of the corner-stones 
of German culture. They have fairly gained a right to love the 
greatest Englishman that ever lived. They have won him for 
themselves by studying and reverencing his divine spirit — perhaps 
the proudest conquest in the field of intellect to be met with in 
the history of the world, this conquering love of a foreign 
nation of forty millions for a humble Englishman who lived three 
hundred years ago ! If I wished to pay the spirit of German 
culture, in one sentence, the highest encomium I can think of, 
it would be that it is worthy of sharing the proudest boast of 
the Anglo-Saxon race — namely, the possession of Shakespeare. 

The other day I was reading an account of the foundation of 
Cavendish College, Cambridge. I may add that its peculiar 
feature is to consist in its cheapness, and in the desire to help 
forward the industrious but poor student — a most praiseworthy 
intention, no doubt, and one which is hailed by a public organ 
with pleasure as a new endeavour to bring the universities and 
the people into closer communion. But it is somewhat strange 
to read such a mouthful about so little in the freest country in 
the world ! 

Why, in poor despotic Germany there are twenty-two univer- U" 
sities, some of them far larger in number of students than any of 
our English ones. Talk of our tiny, new-fangled thread of 
communion between the universities and the people ! Why, the 
German universities are almost identical with the German people ; 
the former are part of the latter, as the heart is part of the human 
frame. The youth of the German people, in their twenty-two 
universities, are not the representatives of the respectability of a 
class, but have long been the torchbearers of every national ideal 
striving towards independence and culture. The German nation 
did not want the threatening wave of democracy in order to open 
up the portals of instruction to the poor. Education has been 
gratuitously open to the poorest in Germany for generations. 



8o National Life and Thought. 

If it be true, as a thinker has said, that "the elevation and 
expansion of the individual is the true aim of government," then 
I say, without fear of contradiction, that, as far as culture is 
concerned — the beautifying of our daily life, its dignity and its 
happiness — even the petty German governments of the past have 
in many ways more to show than we, with all our boasted 
machinery of ballot-boxes — which, by-the-by, the Germans have 
now got into the bargain, as well as universal suffrage. 

It is but lately that it has been thought worth while to educate 
our people at all. The word education is not to be found in 
the gospel of the Manchester school of middle-class money-bags, 
with their ten commandments summed up into one, "Buy in 
the cheapest, and sell in the dearest market." Sell your soul 
to the devil, if necessary; but keep a bank balance, be 
respectable, and court popularity if you can. Germany has its 
unscrupulous devotees of the laws of supply and demand as well 
as we have. It has its greedy traders, who would adulterate every 
article of food if they dare— the only difference being they dare 
not; but they do not rule Germany, much less represent German 
culture. 

We have certainly secured the almost unlimited political liberty 
of the subject. That is undoubtedly a great gain, though due as 
much to our favoured geographical position as to our matchless 
national virtues. But we have, up to the present, lived under an 
almost despotic social tyranny. We have hitherto neglected the 
mental and moral well-being of the helpless unit, and been content 
to leave him unfettered to fight the battle of " the devil take the 
hindermost " without much care of his mental status. 

I do not deny that this hard struggle has done a great deal to 
foster that manliness and energy for which the English national 
character is noted throughout the world. I do not deny that our 
political freedom has given us, in some sense, the supremacy of the 
individual, as against a fussy bureaucracy. But I think well enough 
of my countrymen to believe that we might retain these qualities, 
and yet pour a little light on the lives of those whose fight in the 
battle of life is at best but sunless and dark. 

Hitherto it is the strictly practical that has guided us most. I 
think it is time to mix a little ideality with the elixir of life. 
Fortunately, we are tending in that direction, but more through 
the initiative of private individuals than through the action of our 
responsible authorities. It is by means of such societies as that 
before whom I am lecturing, and of which so many have spontane- 



German Culture. 81 

ously sprung up in this country, that charitable individuals seek 
to make up and atone for a ruthless system of neglect. 

We thought little of education as long as it only meant to us a 
higher perception of life to the people, a weapon to emancipate 
us from social and mental slavery. Not that I mean we are 
forcibly enslaved by others, but rather by ourselves, through our 
ignorance and want of true culture. Unlike some politically 
backward people, we are undoubtedly free in a political sense — the 
pity is that want of culture often prevents our using the freedom 
which the franchise has given us. For I contend, that being so 
favoured through our geographical position in our past political 
history, we ought to enjoy every advantage other nations possess, 
and a deal more besides which they have been unable to attain. 
In money we are the richest nation in the world ; I see no reason 
why we should not be the happiest and the most cultured, which, 
I maintain, we are not. 

We only adopted popular education when we adopted breech- 
loaders. When the German wars of 1866 and 1870 suddenly 
revealed to our surprise that education also helped to make a 
nation fight successfully ; and when it had fought, to compete 
with us in commerce, and to send over its better-educated sons 
here, and take the bread out of the mouth of our neglected, 
untutored countrymen. And this may show you what I 
omitted to refer to at the beginning — namely, that superior 
education may also assist us to prosper in an jQ s. d. sense. 

Now, you may say this is all very well, but seeing is believing. 
Where are the tangible proofs and results of all this culture to 
be seen? How can you trace their connection with the well- 
being of the community ? 

Well, then, let us cast a glance at the outward aspects of the 
country. It is not so very long ago that the poet Coleridge 
referred to Cologne as the town of ugly wenches and nasty 
stenches. Now, I am not going to say that the physical beauty 
of the modern representatives of the mythical eleven thousand 
virgins — God bless them ! — has improved since the days of Cole- 
ridge, nor do I say that sanitary science is as yet as far advanced in 
Germany as it is with us. This, as I said before, is a branch of 
culture in which we are still ahead of the Germans, though it may 
not be for long. For there at least we witness the honest and thor- 
ough application of old-fashioned principles by the corporations, 
whereas with us the best scientific systems are sometimes negli- 
gently and dishonestly applied by our parochial authorities. 



82 National Life and Thought. 

However, I do say I only wish, in order to prove the truth of 
a few of my contentions, that I could accompany some of you 
on a fortnight's trip through the Germany of to-day. 

It would be doubly instructive to you at the present time, when 
we read daily of the dishonest extravagance of our hospitals ; the 
jerrybuilding of our board schools, and its consequences of typhoid 
fever and diphtheria ; the dirt of our metropolitan bakehouses, 
swarming with vermin ; the dirt of our military barracks, of our 
police-cells, and sundry other unsavoury little indications that 
our institutions are not yet all that they might be. 

I would only ask you to come in a fair frame of mind, not in 
that of a lamented club friend of mine, whom I once met in one 
of the most picturesque of the many lovely German watering- 
places. " How do you like Kissingen ? " I asked. " Why, they 
haven't got a decent glass of brandy at the hotel, and I can't get 
up a rubber of whist in the whole blessed place ! " 

I think I could show you dozens of towns in Germany with 
finer and better-kept streets and public buildings than our own. 
The town of Frankfort, for instance, one of the most beautiful 
and most wealthy towns of Europe, has as low a death-rate as 
even our most favoured seaside health resorts, and that not- 
withstanding a drainage system that does not come up to our 
standard. Or, take a typical smaller town, such as Hildesheim, in 
Hanover, a coloured print of which I have brought for your inspec- 
tion. This is a town of about 20,000 inhabitants ; and if you look 
at the print, you will see among its sights five different buildings 
of public schools, every one of which is of interesting, if not of 
commanding architecture. 

Walk through the streets of any one of these German towns 
on a Sunday. You will find them as clean as a new pin. You 
will find the shops closed after mid-day, and the people enjoying 
themselves in a sensible, healthy fashion. In larger towns, 
where there are museums and picture-galleries, they are open 
from early in the day. In the afternoon the population has 
flocked out to the numberless coffee and beer gardens in the 
suburbs, where they are sitting in family groups, all classes inter- 
mingled, listening to the military bands. Suddenly the people 
rise from their seats and take off their hats, but no one leaves 
their places. It is only the king and queen taking an afternoon 
walk with their children, and passing along the country road 
adjoining the beer gardens. The king's family has reigned 
over the country more than 800 years in one unbroken line. 



German Culture. 83 

He himself is acknowledged to be one of the best military 
leaders of the country. The people, although strongly demo- 
cratic in feeling, have a great respect for their ruler and his 
tamily ; but they don't rush after them and mob them. Their 
tact, their self-respect, prevent them doing so. Also, the royal 
family is to be seen almost daily walking among the people, 
and returning their respectful silent greetings. Towards evening 
many stroll back to town and crowd the theatres, where, on a 
Sunday, almost always some classical plays or high-class operas 
are given. 

In few things is the culture of Germany more apparent 
than in the sound character of their amusements, inviting all 
classes alike by their excellence and cheapness. 

It is true you are reminded everywhere of the military charac- 
teristics of the nation. The whole nation is in arms ; it is a 
sad fact, but at least it is not for conquest. But even here the 
effects of "culture" are strongly visible. Go back to the 
Franco-German war, and history — I believe even French 
history — will tell you that, during a six months' influx of nearly 
a million men in an enemy's country, flushed with the 
excitement of victory, there is not one single authenticated 
instance recorded of insult to a woman. If you want to know 
what that means, you can take the trouble to read up the detailed 
records of a few previous struggles in the history of this century. 

I remember being present in Berlin at the triumphal entry of 
the troops, 45,000 men, in July 1871. The town was so crowded 
that I had to pay 15s. a-night for being allowed to lie down 
at night on the floor with several others in a fifth-rate hotel. 
I think I was on and off the pavement that day from five in the 
morning till nearly five the next morning, and I can assure you 
that I did not see one single drunken person. 

But let us come back to our times. Look in on a German town 
on a week-day, and pass the public schools. You will be struck by 
the palatial buildings, situated on the finest sites, reserved for 
the education of all classes alike, at which instruction is given 
free to all alike. Come nearer, the windows are wide open, and 
you may just happen to witness the singing lesson, and hear the 
youthful voices sing one of those glorious choral songs of Martin 

Luther : — 

" God is a mighty citadel, 
A trusty shield and weapon." 

Let us come away out for a stroll in the open country. You 



84 National Life and Thought. 

may not see many mansions of the immensely wealthy nobility ; 
but what there is will not be walled round with bricks and 
ornamented with boards advising you that you will be prosecuted 
by the lord of the manor if you dare try to look at and trespass 
on the choicest bits of scenery of your country, the private 
property of a few. I say, it was want of culture of the heart that 
originally made landowners surround their property with brick 
walls, broken bottle glass, and iron fences. In Germany you can, 
as a rule, at all times walk, unhindered and unheeded, in the 
private grounds and gardens of the great. You can see and 
rejoice in all — gardens, orchards, and vineyards ; and nobody will 
be there to watch you, and warn you that you are a trespasser. 
But also nobody would dream of robbing an orchard in Germany. 
A people is backward in culture, discipline, and self-respect that 
cannot be trusted to pass under a tree without pilfering its fruit. 
But the sight of fruit is no incentive to theft in Germany. A 
numerous peasant class exists. They are landowners and fruit- 
growers. In fact, throughout the greater part of Germany the 
public high roads are lined with fruit-trees, and passers by are 
kindly allowed to pick up whatever falls to the ground. 

Walk on. You may come upon some big factory, nowhere a 
very picturesque sight ; but in Germany sometimes anything but 
an ugly one. You may even chance to come when work is 
stopped. The workmen are all marshalled in military fashion in 
a large courtyard, for they have all been soldiers, workmen, clerks, 
and employers alike, and as often as not the latter as privates in 
the ranks. You ask, What is the matter ? It is the fifty years' 
jubilee of an old workman. There is going to be a little speech- 
making, and a concert afterwards by the band of the men. The 
head of the firm is going to hand a gold watch to the workman in 
question ; more important still, the reigning prince of the petty 
state has sent down one of his own ministers in person to deliver 
the gold medal for faithful service to the humble workman. 

This may be a bit of the comedy of paternal government ; it 
may be mere sentiment. Then all I can say is, the world is the 
poorer for the lack of a little of such sentiment. Now, if you are 
not already tired of my company, then come back to the German 
town with me. It is already dark, but we are met by a vast 
surging concourse of people. A brilliant torchlight procession 
marches past, followed by a large crowd and a band playing — 
■ not one of those wretched German bands you see, and unfortun- 
ately hear too, in London, which do not hail from Germany at 



German Culture. 



85 



all, which are in fact forbidden there. No, it is a band composed 
of citizens, some of whom have fought in twenty pitched battles 
in defence of their country, and have the medal on their breast 
to testify to it. What is it all about? we ask. Oh, it is the 
twenty-five years' jubilee of a popular lady-teacher at one of the 
public schools, and the different trade-unions have turned out to 
do honour to her, and to bring her a serenade ! Stand still a 
moment in the crowd, and let your thoughts wander. I fancy it 
would take a strong dose of insular prejudice to make you 
believe that you are standing in midst of the unhappy population 
of a down-trodden, despotic, military-ridden country ! 

Now, in conclusion, let me come back to the little woodcut I 
mentioned to you, and the words inscribed beneath it, " What 
does it then matter as long as you are happy ? " There you have 
the key-note of my thoughts on the culture of Germany — the wish 
to point out a few items illustrative of the dignity, self-respect, and 
happiness of the greatest number ; and I cannot but think that, 
notwithstanding the unavoidable blood-tax of a so-called, but 
wrongly so-called, despotic government, in some respects the 
Germans are happier than we are, if not than we might be J and if 
so, their culture, fostered by their government, has largely con- 
tributed to that result. 



VI. 
RUSSIA. 

W. R. MORFILL, M.A. 

MY hearers may imagine that in the short space of an hour 
I should never be able to exhaust all that can be said 
about Russia — certainly one of the most interesting of European 
countries. All I can hope to do is to set before you on this 
occasion some of the most noteworthy points in the political, 
historical, and social life of this great people. 

I have some fear that I shall not carry the sympathies of all my 
audience with me, and there will be some who will find my lecture 
dull, when I say frankly at the beginning that I have no stories 
of Socialists or Nihilists, no revelations of "underground Russia," 
as it is called, to communicate. 

In the first place, we shall probably be best able to realise the 
importance of Russia as a -factor in European politics if we 
consider the area of the country and the number of its population. 
The former exceeds 8,500,000 square miles, and, according to the 
valuable article contributed to the last edition of the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, the gross total of the inhabitants is one hundred and 
six millions. Of course in this aggregate a great number of races 
are included, the Slavs largely predominating. The Russians, 
if we add the Malo-Russians in the South, and the White Russians 
in the West, amount to more than sixty-three millions. These 
form the dominant race, and the dominant tongue is the Great 
Russian, which is now the only language allowed to be spoken at 
court, and has been so since the days of Nicholas. During last 
century and the early part of the present, French was in vogue — 
just as it was at the German court and in Sweden ; but when a 
people have risen to self-consciousness, they don't caie any longer 
to talk in the idiom of the foreigner. Such a habit argues a 
degraded condition in a nation, and it speaks well for the English 
that during last century, when the French language had such 
world-wide influence, our grandfathers and great grandfathers 
87 



88 National Life and Tliought. 

never tolerated anything else than their native Saxon. At the 
present time, no one can hold any office in Russia who is not 
acquainted with the national language in which all business is 
transacted. 

After the Slavs come the Litu-Lettish, the Ural-Altaic, and 
Tatar races. These populations cannot be said to affect the 
solidarity of the Russian Empire. The first amount to about 
three millions. They are an ancient people, who have been 
driven, as it were, into remote corners by advancing races. They 
have been receding since the commencement of the historical 
period. They remained pagans longer than any other of the 
European populations. They were converted in a rather violent 
manner in the fourteenth century, but when Herberstein travelled 
among them at the beginning of the sixteenth, he found them in 
some places still worshipping lizards. 

Russia, as early as the time of Peter the Great, had acquired a 
portion of Finland ; the rest of the country was ceded by Sweden 
to Russia by the peace of Frederikshamm in 1809. Up to this 
time the Finns have been able to preserve their diet, and have 
enjoyed autonomy, but we have been hearing latterly that these 
valuable privileges are going to be taken away from them. Let 
us hope that the report will not prove true. Certainly the Finnish 
language has developed under Russian protection ; under the 
Swedes it had been depressed, but now the professors in the 
University of Helsingfors deliver their lectures in it. 

The Turco-Tatar races inhabiting Russia are numerous, amount- 
ing to 3,629,000. They are in a backward state, and offer little 
to our notice that is interesting. They do not exhibit any dis- 
loyalty to Russia, and indeed do not seem to have any powers of 
cohesion. During the last Turco-Russian war, as Leroy-Beaulieu 
has told us, prayers were offered up in all the mosques of the 
Caucasus for the success of the Russian arms. Perhaps it is true 
of Russia, as it is also true of us with regard to our own Mussul- 
man subjects, that they would rise against us, if we showed any 
weakness ; but this is the nature of subject-races, especially of 
the conceited and ignorant Mussulman, when he is under the 
dominion of the giaour, whom he is pleased to think his inferior. 
I remember reading years ago, in a book on the Indian mutiny, 
how changed the manner of the native servants became towards 
their masters, when they thought that the raj of the Europeans 
was coming to an end. 

A few words must now be said about the Poles and Germans. 



Russia. 89 

Of the former there are many in Russia, not only in the old 
kingdom of Poland, now divided into Russian governments, but 
also in the Ukraine and Lithuania, where they form the landed 
proprietors. They amount to nearly six millions. The feud 
between the Russians and Poles is of long standing. We have it 
as early as the time of the wars between Stephen Bathory and 
Ivan the Terrible, in the sixteenth century, and the occupation of 
Moscow by the Poles under Wladyslaw or Ladislaus the Second. 
The latter by force of arms caused himself to be elected Tsar, and 
held the supreme power for two years, owing to the exhausted 
state of the country, for it is impossible to conceive the Russians 
tolerating for any lengthened period a sovereign of the Latin faith. 
The iniquitous dismemberments of Poland which took place last 
century are well known. I shall say nothing to attempt to 
exonerate Russia in this matter, but we must remember that the 
blame is to be shared by the Prussians and Austrians. The 
spoliation was not begun by Russia, as must be acknowledged in 
all fairness. The plan was suggested to Catherine by Frederick 
the Great, through the agency of his brother Prince Henry, when 
he visited St. Petersburg. Austria has treated her Polish subjects 
well, but the same cannot be said of Prussia. A Polish gentleman 
once complained to me of the complete Germanisation of the 
province of Posen : the names of villages and small towns, some 
of which are of historical celebrity, are changed into Sedan, 
Weissenburg, and Bismarckdorf ; the porters at the stations are 
Germans, and the apparent Germanisation of the country is 
complete, but you have only to step a few yards from the railway 
station and you will frequently find yourself in a country where 
hardly a word of German is understood. As I have said before, 
it is impossible on the present occasion to enter into a discussion 
about these melancholy events. I can only say that the Pole, 
in his relations with the Russian, is dealing with a brother Slav, 
who does not regard him as an inferior being, as the German 
affects to do. Some of my hearers will perhaps remember the 
sarcastic verses of Heine on the Poles, who, although by origin 
a Jew — a people who, we must confess with shame,, have been 
grossly ill-treated and despised — still writes with the most 
aristocratic race-hatred when dealing with the Slavs; such is 
the inconsistency of human nature. 

There is another powerful alien element in Russia — the 
German. Now we hear a great deal about the Germans in the 
Baltic provinces, and the Russian encroachments upon them. 



90 National Life and Thought. 

The Germans have plenty to say about the Muskovitischer, 
Byzantinismus, and other things of the kind ; but, of course, the 
Germans dwelling in these provinces have no more to do in 
reality with the German Empire, than the inhabitants of the 
Channel Islands have to do with the French Republic. Prince 
Kropotkin, in his valuable article already alluded to, tells us that, 
in the Baltic provinces, the prevailing population is Esthonian, 
Curonian, or Lettish; the Germans (landlords in the country or 
tradesmen and artizans in the towns) in the three provinces, Riga 
included, hardly reach a total of 120,000 out of 1,800,000 
inhabitants. The relations of the Esthonians and Letts to their 
landlords are anything but friendly. 

I must here quote an anecdote which my friend, the late Yuri 
Samaun (one of the most eminent of Russian patriots), told me, 
which illustrates the spirit in which the Baltic Germans have but 
too often acted towards the native population. Some years ago 
an Esthonian Finn emigrated from one of these provinces to 
America and made a considerable fortune there. Being, I 
suppose, at length overcome by a sort of nostalgie or mal de pays, 
he resolved to return to his native country, and on coming back 
spent a part of his fortune in founding a handsome Finnish club. 
The German inhabitants, who had always considered the Finns a 
kind of proletariat, were highly indignant ; such a thing had never 
been known before. What right had a semi-civilised race to such 
social privileges ? I merely quote this anecdote to show what has 
been the state of feeling there, and not to engender race-hatred, 
still less to speak disrespectfully of a race with which Englishmen 
are so closely connected, and which has furnished to the world so 
many eminent men. 

The Semitic race is represented by three millions of Jews, 
chiefly in Poland, in west and south-west Russia, and the 
Caucasus. There is also the peculiar sect of the Jews called the 
Karaites in the Crimea ; they are found in considerable numbers 
in the picturesque city of Baktshi-Serai, once the residence of the 
Khans. It is deeply to be regretted that in the last few years 
some obsolete laws to the prejudice of the Jews should have been 
revived in Russia. Some of them, however, have already been 
abrogated. I can only join with the eminent Frenchman 
Leroy-Beaulieu, who has written so well upon Russia, in his 
eloquent appeal to the Czar to grant complete religious freedom 
throughout his dominions — a policy especially necessary in a 
country which can show such varieties of belief among its 






Russia. 9 1 

inhabitants. Certainly the feudal maxim, '• Cujus est regio ejus est 
religio," is long since obsolete. Whatever the policy of the 
government may be, the Russian peasant cannot be accused of 
intolerance. He is found living peaceably side by side with 
Mohammedans in many parts of Russia. If there is any antipathy 
felt towards the Jews by the peasant, it is because he thinks he 
is exploited by him. Careful observers of the matter all concur in 
this view. It is more the Kahal, or Jewish economic society, 
that the peasant fears than any dogma. In some periods of 
Russian history Judaism has actually made many converts. 

Russia has not many populous cities. The list is headed 
by St. Petersburg with 929,090, but many of the so-called towns of 
Russia are in reality little better than villages. Catherine 
created several, which after her death fell into insignificance. 
The fact is, the Slav, where he is not mixed with other races, is a 
pure agriculturist, and has few trading tendencies. It was the 
want of an active middle class which threw all the trade of 
Poland into the hands of Germans and Jews, and was one of the 
main causes of the fall of the Republic. It has been truly 
remarked of that unhappy country that there was no sympathy 
between the nobility and peasantry, and therefore no national 
spirit. The Jews who busied themselves with commerce sold at 
the same time to the serfs and their masters, and thus prevented 
the two classes from coming in contact with each other. They 
carried on the economic functions of everyday life, and yet 
could not be considered a part of the nation. 

I have but little time for anything more than a few general 
remarks on the physical geography of Russia, but something must 
be said, because it is only from realising this that we are able to 
explain some of the facts of the history of a nation. 

Russia, as a whole, is a vast plain ; high plateaus and mountains 
are only met with in the Asiatic parts of the Empire. These flat 
lands vary in their characteristics — sometimes they are dry deserts 
or low table-lands, or lake regions, or marshy plains. There is 
the splendid Caucasian range which separates Europe from Asia, 
and in the east of Siberia there are volcanoes. When in 1224 
the Mongols invaded the country, the vast plains of Russia assisted 
them in their incursions. There Were no mountain fastnesses in 
which an heroic people could make their stand ; the cities were, 
for the most part, small and poorly fortified, and thus the country 
lay at the feet of these barbarians. Wordsworth has told us in a 
beautiful sonnet that liberty has two voices, that of the mountain 



92 National Life and TJwught. 

and of the sea, but both mountain and sea were equally wanting 
to Russia. Of course, Russia has abundance of water power in 
lakes, huge rivers, and canals, and great diversities of climate. 

When we consider the varieties of race in Russia — Slavs, Finns, 
Germans, Tatars, Georgians, Armenians, and many others — we 
can see that it must be no easy task to unite all these peoples, 
with their different religions and languages, under one government ; 
and perhaps this difficulty may furnish some slight excuse for the 
slow progress of Russia in constitutional development with the 
Aryan portion of her population. Her course is smooth enough, but 
it is difficult to imagine, at all events at present, a Parliament in 
which Chukches, Bashkirs, and Samoyedes would be members. 

It does not come within the scope of my lecture to give any 
detailed account of Russian history ; too much of this would be 
merely of antiquarian and academic interest ; but in order to 
understand a nation we must see what forces underlie it, what 
stages of experience it has gone through, and these I shall en- 
deavour to trace. 

No one can say anything with much certainty about the Slavs 
till the times of Procopius and Jordanes, in the sixth century a.d. 
The ancients knew nothing about them ; perhaps the Russians 
are to be found in the Budini and Neuri of Herodotus. There 
seems to be some continuity of the population there, because on 
the splendid electrum vase which was discovered in the tomb at 
Kertch, we find figures represented with the same expression of 
face and dressed in the same way, especially with their trousers 
tucked in their boots, as one may see any day among the peasants 
of Russia at the present time. 

We have a lot of Sagas in the picturesque chronicle of Nestor, 
or that which is attributed to him. He was a monk of Kiev who 
lived in the eleventh century. It would be difficult to say how 
much of this has any historical value; certainly we meet with 
many replicas of his stories among the Norse legends. We hear 
of Scandinavian adventurers coming and making themselves 
masters of the Slavonic tribes. Novgorod and Kiev rise into 
importance, the former the great commercial city, and the latter 
the first to be Christianised. Round it gather the religious tradi- 
tions of Russia. She receives her civilisation from Constantinople, 
and it is the Greek, not Latin, form of our common faith. We 
must thus recognise what some people are unable or unwilling to 
understand — how Russia to all the Eastern Christians is really the 
head of their Church. We owe her some gratitude for her 



Russia. 



93 



protection of them. So great was the power of the Turks, and so 
apathetic were the Western sovereigns — -as shown among other 
things, by allowing these barbarians to take Constantinople — that 
in a short time all South-Eastern Europe and the Christians of 
Asia, such as the Georgians, would have followed the example of 
the Bosnian Beys and gone over to Islam en masse. But Peter 
the Great turned the tide by showing the raya/is, groaning under 
the Turkish yoke, that they could look to Russia for protection. 
It is to her that the new nationality of Bulgaria, which gives such 
excellent promise, owes its existence Granted that her conduct to 
the Bulgarians at the present time is ungenerous — and I am 
sorry to confess it — still no Bulgarian can forget that, had it not 
been for Russian blood and treasure, he would still be treated 
as a dog by a Mussulman master — still, withal, the smallest rights, 
politically and socially. We cannot, therefore, be surprised that 
the Christians of the East have felt grateful to Russia. Have we 
not played into her hands by refusing to recognise the young 
states rising upon the ruins of the decrepit and moribund Turkish 
Empire ? We must reach out a hand to them unless we wish to 
lose our influence in the East. 

In this early and half-legendary period of Russia, we have 
Vladimir of Kiev, the first Christian sovereign, the nine-hundredth 
anniversary of whose baptism was celebrated at Kiev in 1888. 
Yaroslav is the first legislator, and we have a specimen of his law- 
making in the Rtisskaya Pravda, which has come down to us in 
a manuscript of the chronicles of Novgorod. One of the great 
features of this early code is, that we see in it the Russians wholly 
unaffected by those Mongolian corruptions which afterwards 
vitiated them. 

Russia was at that time a purely European country, and on a 
level with the other European nations. At this time the rural 
peasants were not bound to the soil; they were not in that 
condition till the sixteenth century. As yet Moscow has not 
arisen : the history of the country groups itself round Kiev and 
Novgorod. For nearly two hundred years after this, we have the 
most dreary period in the Russian annals. The country is 
divided among a lot of princelings. These little Slavonic princi- 
palities, like the small Saxon kingdoms of the heptarchy, are not 
destined at first to be united, although joined in brotherhood by a 
common language and common institutions. They have not the 
instinct of nationality, and at first the desire of private aggrandise- 
ment impedes unity. Thus they are ripe for the attacks of the 



94 National Life and Thought. 

Mongols, who waste them with fire and sword. All Russia except 
Novgorod was under Mongol rule. During this gloomy period, 
there was little national life ; but a great many monasteries were 
built, and in them the monks were cloistered, and busied them- 
selves with the compilation of a series of chronicles. 

The yoke of the Mongols was indeed humiliating, but it can- 
not be said to have had a great influence upon the country. 
They made no attempt to turn the people into Tatars. They 
were satisfied with the homage of the princes, with the poll-tax 
which was exacted, and the military contingents which were fur- 
nished. Intermarriages took place between the upper classes 
occasionally, and thus the Muscovite nobility received a certain 
Oriental admixture, although the amount of it has been greatly 
exaggerated. Napoleon is reported to have said : " Scratch a 
Russian and you will find a Tatar," but, like most epigrams, it is 
only half a truth. There is nothing of the Tatar in the tall, blonde 
men, with blue eyes, and frequently red or yellow hair, whom we 
see forming the bulk of the population of so many parts of Russia. 
They look more like Scandinavians than Tatars. 

Many of the Russian customs — such as the seclusion of the 
women, and the dress, the long, loose, flowing caftan — now became 
Oriental, but this was altered by Peter the Great. People are apt 
to imagine that the Russian language contains a great many 
Tatar words, but in reality such is far from being the case. They 
are confined to a few expressions for clothing and names of 
material objects. To the Mongols is probably owing the intro- 
duction of the knout, the use of which is now illegal. The word, 
however, appears to be of Scandinavian origin, the same as our 
knot. 

The little principality of Moscow during this gloomy period con- 
tains the germ of the future Russian Empire. It reminds one of 
the fine lines of Cowper on Yardley Oak. When speaking of the 
magnificent tree, he tells us there was a time when it was an acorn, 
and the thievish jay might have swallowed 

' ' All its close-woven latitude of boughs 
And all its embryo vastness at a gulp." 

It is in 1147 that the city of Moscow first appears in the 
Russian chronicles, but for a hundred years after its foundation 
it remains an obscure dependency of the principality of Suzdal. 
Gradually the little state which has grown round it receives 
constant accessions of territory. During the Mongol invasion 
Russia lost much — Kiev, together with Volhynia, Podolia, and 



Russia. 95 

Galicia ; and the last of these she had never regained. When 
Ivan III. and his two vigorous successors are seen holding the 
reins of power, and emerging from the chaos of the Middle Ages, 
Russia has the powerful principality of Lithuania on the west — the 
official language of which we must remember was White Russian — 
stretching almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and by the 
marriage of Jagiello, its prince, with Jadviga, the heiress to the 
Polish throne, it has become united with that country. Thus 
Russia comes into conflict with Poland; the former symbolises 
the Greek Church, the latter Catholicism. Their rivalries are to 
last for two centuries ; nay, they are not terminated at the present 
day. Russia is kept from the sea in the north by the Swedes, and 
in the south by the Turks, in whom her old enemies the Mongols 
are merged. She lies like a sluggish mass, cut off from commun- 
ication with the outer world. When Ivan IV. wants artificers to 
help him in his plans for civilising Russia, the Poles can block their 
entrance into his dominions. Hence we shall not be surprised 
at the welcome he gives to English seamanship, which brings 
ambassadors to him by way of the White Sea. He has his idea of 
getting an outlet into the Baltic, but it is too early. However, he 
has some success in the south, and gets Astrakhan on the Caspian. 
He also stretches his empire to Siberia. This cruel but far-sighted 
man died in 1584. 

The press had been introduced into Russia twenty years 
previously. The country at this time swarmed with Englishmen, 
who have left us some very amusing stories about Ivan. I only 
wish I had time to tell some of them here. 

The vigorous rule of the usurper Boris Godunov (1598-1605) 
was on the whole beneficial to Russia. He also was a far-seeing 
man, and had the courage to break with the exclusive traditions of 
his country, for he sent some young Russians to England to be 
educated. After his death Russia is again put back for nearly fifty 
years by internal struggles and rival adventurers ; but Alexis, father 
of Peter the Great, finally turns the tide ; the Western provinces, 
including historical Kiev, are got back, and the transfer by the 
Zoporoghian Cossacks of their allegiance from the Poles to Russia 
brings her closer to the Black Sea. The country is full of useful 
adventurers, including many Scotchmen. 

Peter the Great comes before us as a titanic figure. Inheriting 
all the traditions of autocracy, we must not feel surprised if, like 
our own Edward I., he had no scruple about removing any 
obstacles which appeared in his path. To the same cause must 



g6 National Life and Thought. 

be traced his lack of self-rule. He was descended, we must 
remember, from a long line of semi- Asiatic sovereigns ; and if he 
had not been a man of powerful genius, would have been content 
as they were, with the idleness and luxury of a palace. 

He was willing to abandon all these pleasures, so captivating to 
the ordinary mind, to put himself, as it were, to school ; to endure 
privations and labour, in order to break with a system against 
which his intellect rebelled. At the beginning of his reign, Peter 
found Russia Asiatic, he left her European. He created a navy, 
and gave her an outlet in the Baltic ; instead of the disorderly, 
badly-accoutred regiments of the Streltsi, he gave Russia an army, 
clothed and disciplined on the European model. He added 
many provinces to the Empire, constructed canals, developed 
industries, and caused useful books to be translated into Russian, 
so that his ignorant subjects might be instructed. By the way, it 
is a curious fact, and not generally known that the first Russian 
grammar was printed in 1696 at Oxford, while Peter the Great 
was in England. He gave Russia libraries and museums, galleries 
of painting and sculpture ; and finally, from an obscure barbaric 
power, isolated from her European sister kingdom, he created a 
powerful Empire, able to make its voice heard in the councils of 
Europe. 

The feeble reigns of Catherine L, Peter II., Anne, and Elizabeth 
effected little. A worthy successor to Peter did not appear till 
Catherine II. ascended the throne. Russia then advanced to the 
Black Sea, and gained the Crimea, and Odessa and Sevastopol 
were built. 

There is no need of going through the well-known events which 
make her prominent in nineteenth century history — the great 
Napoleon War, the burning of Moscow, and the retreat of the 
French in 18 12. Familiar to us are also the wars of Nicholas, 
especially our own conflicts with him, when the fields of the Crimea 
were soaked with our blood. With what sad feelings have I 
walked over the site of these fiercely-contested battles — 
" How that red rain has made the harvest grow ! " 

The most noteworthy event of later times has been the great 
emancipation of the serfs in 1861. I have already said that the 
rural peasants were only fixed to the soil so late as the time of 
Boris Godunov, at the close of the sixteenth century. The 
krestiane, as they were called, had been personally free up to 
that date, and had the right of quitting their masters. This right 
was especially put in practice on St. George's Day, and the recol- 



Russia. 



97 



lection of it has survived among the peasantry till the present 
time, in a solitary proverb, " Vot iebe, babushka, yuriev dyen." 
"Here's St. George's Day for you, old woman." After this time, we 
find serfdom gradually developing. The first suggestion of their 
emancipation belongs to Prince Golitsin, the favourite of the 
Tsarevna Sophia, towards the close of the seventeenth century. 
In his conversation with the Polish Ambassador Neuville, he 
spoke to him of the necessity of putting Russia upon the same 
footing as other more civilised nations, and he thought that the 
first step towards this was the emancipation of the peasant, and 
the transference to him of the land which he cultivated. Nothing, 
however, at that time resulted from these intentions, and they did 
not get their liberty till the time of Alexander II. 

At the emancipation, twenty-three millions were set free. It 
is now pretty generally known, that according to the system of 
the Russian Mir, the land in a village is divided among the 
peasants in proportion to the number of their families, and that 
the re-distribution takes place at certain intervals, this and other 
points concerning the Mir being settled by the village parliament, 
at which not only men but women are allowed to vote. 

My hearers will find all this clearly explained in the excel- 
lent work of Sir Mackenzie Wallace. Subsequent researches 
on the subject have shown that this land system is of great 
antiquity, and can be traced thoroughout Europe — to say nothing 
of Asia. In India the English met with it as soon as they 
had become well acquainted with the country, and were at first 
puzzled by it. In Switzerland and Servia it is still found 
flourishing, and there are traces of it in England and Scotland. 
The subject is too vast to be treated here ; in fact, to do it justice, 
I should require the time allowed me for the whole lecture. 
Many persons have thought that in this institution the Russians 
have the germ of self-government, but in other respects the 
peasants and artisans show ideas of co-operation : thus the artel 
or confederation of workmen, whereby they lodge and board 
together, each contributing his quota, is very curious and inter- 
esting. People see in these things a certain, power of cohesion 
and independent action among the Russian lower classes ; and, 
as Leroy-Beaulieu very truly remarks, the number of religious 
sects among them, which suffered considerable persecution in 
old time, and even now are put under disabilities, shows that in 
matters of conscience the Russian will have his individual 
opinion, and will not be dictated to. 

G 



\ 



98 National Life and Thought. 

I shall say something about these religious sects further on, 
but will now proceed to consider the condition of the serf in 
his newly enfranchised position. At the emancipation the com- 
mune (Mr) received the village land, and might either pay as 
before by so many days' personal labour from the inhabitants, 
or might elect to redeem the allotments by the help of the crown, 
and they then became free from all obligations to the landlord. 
The crown paid the landlord, and the peasants have to pay the 
crown for forty-nine years six per cent, interest on the money 
advanced, that is, nine to twelve roubles on allotment. Each 
village commune received 13! acres (five desiatiue) for each 
male member. 

For many interesting facts on the condition of the peasantry, 
I recommend my hearers to read the little work of Mr. Ling 
Roth, entitled, Agriculture and Peasantry in Eastern Russia. 

As regards the government of Russia, which is a pure autocracy, 
I need say nothing ; it is well known to all of you. Concerning the 
Church, as I have said before, it follows the orthodox or Greek 
faith. An excellent book has been recently written on Religion 
in Russia, by M. Leroy-Beaulieu, which forms the third volume of 
his opus magnum, L 'Empire les Tsars et les Russes. He does not 
consider the religion of the muzhik or peasant a mere system of 
fetish. Because it is overlaid with so many gross superstitions 
and ceremonies, it does not follow that there is no real piety or 
feeling underneath it. Tried by the same standard, the Italian 
and Spanish peasant, and, we might add, the Roman Catholic 
Irish, might be considered pagans. One of the most striking 
facts in the history of the Russian Church is the raskol (lit. 
cutting asunder, or splitting), the great religious schism which 
began when Nikon, the primate, corrected the errors which had 
crept into the religious books. This priest was a remarkable 
man ; some have not hesitated to call him the greatest man 
produced by Russia before the days of Peter. When summoned 
before the council, his answers exhibited remarkable boldness. 
Nikon was the Beckett of Russia, and might have carried the day 
with the superstitious Emperor Alexis, whose ecclesiastical pro- 
clivities have been noted for us in the quaint book of the 
physician, Samuel Collins, but the Boyars were too much for 
him. They talked the Tsar over, and Nikon lost his ecclesiastical 
dignities and ended as a simple monk. Thus came the staro- 
obriadtsi or old believers into existence, and since that time sects 
have multiplied in Russia down to their latest development — that 



Russia. 



99 



of the Stundists — a kind of offshoot of German Protestantism, who 
derive their name from the word Stunde. There are many 
striking parallels to these sects in America and England. When 
we see the shakuni or leapers, who make religious dances a great 
part of their ritual, and the molokani, or milk-drinkers, we are 
reminded of the Shakers and Quakers. Other sects recall the 
Plymouth Brethren and the Irvingites. M. Leroy-Beaulieu does 
not consider that the Tsar is as much the head of the Russian 
Church as Queen Victoria of the English. Neither Moscow nor 
St. Petersburg, he says, has ever seen an assembly of laymen like 
the English Parliament legislate in Church questions. 

Much has been said about the ignorance of the Russian rural 
priest, but we must remember the laborious life he leads, the 
great extent of the parishes which are under his care, and the 
privations to which he is subject. Poor and half-educated as he 
frequently is, he is the consoler of the muzhik in his troubles, and 
the partaker of his joys, as the Irish priest has been in the sister 
isle; he is like the "soggarth aroon" of Banim's pathetic songs. 
We must all hope that Russia may advance gradually in the path of 
constitutional progress, but it is difficult to see how she can move 
in any other way than slowly and by degrees. The peasants are 
at the present time too illiterate and the middle class is too small, 
so that all power would necessarily fall into the hands of the 
nobility. 

The late Emperor Alexander II. did a great deal for Russia ; 
his assassination was not merely a crime, but a blunder. I 
cannot do better than quote the words of Dr. George Brandes, 
the Dane, the author of Moderne Geister, and other works (p 
129): — "Nothing has set Russia further backward than this last 
occurrence, which was pregnant with misfortune. It immediately 
prevented the formation 'of a sort of parliamentary constitution, 
which had just then been promised. It frightened the successor 
to the crown back from the paths his father had entered upon at 
the beginning of his reign, and it seemed to justify the rulers in 
reprisals and measures of persecution of every kind." With these 
words I turn from a part of my subject which suggests painful 
reflections, and gladly leave the heated atmosphere of politics to 
say a few words on Russian literature. 

Russian authors are at the present time coming into fashion, 
and my audience may care to hear a few remarks upon them. 

Beside their written literature the Russians have abundance of 
folk-song, legend, and folk-tale. The former are called bilini, 

L«rc 



IOO National Life and Thought. 

which may be roughly translated, "tales of the olden time." 
They have been divided into various cycles, as, for instance, those 
of the older heroes, siarshie bogatiri, those of Vladimir, the Prince 
of Kiev, of Novgorod and Moscow. The heroes of the first cycle 
are Titanic beings, who have the power of assuming various 
shapes. A great hero of the time of Vladimir is Ilya Muromets, 
an unwieldy giant, in whose history some writers have seen a 
symbolism of Russia herself. The cycle of Novgorod has stories 
to tell us about rich merchants, but perhaps the cycle of Moscow, 
with its legends about Ivan the Terrible, is most interesting. 

An Englishman named Richard James, a graduate of Oxford, 
who for some reason was in Russia at the beginning of the 
seventeenth century, either copied out, or caused to be copied 
out, some curious contemporary bilini, or historical ballads. 
His pocket-book containing these pieces is preserved in the 
Bodleian Library. Beside the bilini, there are many collections 
of skazki, or prose tales, some of the most interesting of which 
were made known to the English public by my late friend Mr. 
Ralston. 

As regards their written literature, the Russians have a series of 
chronicles, compiled by monks in their cloisters, and extending 
from that attributed to Nestor in the eleventh century to the 
time of Peter the Great, in the latter part of the seventeenth. 
In the earlier period of her history, in fact, down to the time of 
Peter the Great, the traditions of Russian literature were wholly 
Byzantine. We have sermons and lives of the saints in abun- 
dance, and perhaps there is more to please the antiquary and 
the philologist than the man of taste. There are a few exceptions, 
such as the prose-poem on the Expedition of Prince Igor in the 
twelfth century, and the Zadontschina of the fourteenth, which 
describes the great victory of Dmitri Donskoi over the Tatars. 
The fashion imitated was nearly always Byzantine, and that, it 
must be confessed, was not a noble school in which an infant 
literature could be formed. The Byzantine Greeks have been 
sarcastically called the European Chinese ; their civilisation has 
been said to be the corpse of antiquity laid out in state, and all 
this is more or less true. Poetry was dead among them, unless 
we are to find it in the tvoXltlkol o-riyoi of Tzetzes, and history 
had degenerated in the veriest drybones of chronicles. But 
changes were coming, even before the time of Peter, when the 
Russians got back Kiev in 1686, which, although the cradle of 
their nationality, had for upwards of three hundred years been 



Russia. IOI 

in the possession of Lithuanian and Pole. Something of the 
culture of the West was communicated to them by the Academy 
which had been founded there, and Simeon Polotski, who came 
to Moscow in 1665, and in 1672 was appointed tutor to the 
children of Tsar Alexis. He began to write verses on the Latin 
model and sacred dramas. With the reforms of Peter the Great 
commences an entirely new period in the history of Russian 
literature. From her Byzantine traditions, from legends of saints, 
confused chronicles and orthodox hymnologies, Russia was to 
pass, by one of the most violent changes ever witnessed in the 
literature of any country, into epics moulded on the Henriade 
and tedious odes in the style of Jean Baptiste Rousseau. 

Then appeared Lamonosov, the son of a poor fisherman of 
Archangel, who forms one of the curious band of peasant authors, 
of very various merit, it must be confessed, who present such a 
singular and unexpected phenomenon in Russian literature. The 
life of this man, who died full of honours, exhibits the most 
startling contrasts. The reign of Catherine II. (1762-1796) saw 
the rise of a whole generation of court poets. The maxim, 
■'' Un Au°ustc peutaisement faire un Virgile" was seen in all its 
absurdity in semi-barbarous Russia. These wits were supported 
by the Empress and her immediate entourage, to whom their 
florid productions were ordinarily addressed. Macaulay has 
somewhere a homely but very vigorous simile to express the 
relations in which a writer stands towards his public in countries 
where education is little diffused. He says that the patron, if 
he wants to have the odes of a poet, must support the poet — 
just, he adds, as when you go to out-of-the-way countries, if 
you want a mutton-chop, you must buy the whole sheep. In the 
strict sense of the word, at that time there was no reading 
public in Russia ; only in the dreary huts of the peasants, through 
the long winter nights, the wandering rhapsodist kept up the 
tradition of their popular legends. But the Gallicised courtiers 
of the epoch of Catherine regarded these productions with 
contempt, as the babble of savages. They were only to be 
collected in the present century, when the great reaction against 
the pseudo-classical school had set in. 

The classicists, who numbered some prominent poets, Derz- 
havin among them, lasted till some way on in the present century. 
Then came the introduction of the romantic school by Zhukovski, 
who survived to a good old age, dying in 1852. Alexander 
Pushkin (1799-1857) symbolises this school at its height, with 



102 National Life and TJiouglit. 

strong influences of Byronism, in spite of which he has written 
poems national to the core, and was followed by Lermontov and 
others. 

It was in Alexis Koltsov that the real voice of the Russian 
people first spoke, which up to that time had only been heard 
in the national songs. I will give some of the details of his life 
as it illustrates Russian society. 

Lemonosov, Pushkin, and Zhukovski, were in one sense artificial 
poets, well acquainted with the literatures of Western Europe ; but 
in the new writer all Russia recognised a man of the people, who, 
like Burns, could tell their aspirations and griefs, and whose songs 
had been awakened by the influence of the popular lays of the 
country. It is in this sense that Koltsov is the most national 
of the Russian poets. 

Alexis Koltsov was born at Voronezh, in the government of 
the same name, October 2nd (old style), 1809. His father traded 
in sheep, whose carcases were to be boiled down for the tallow 
factories. The family had been engaged in this calling for some 
generations, and were fairly substantial people of the burgher 
class. Still, educationally speaking, his condition was a low one. 
If Russian tradesmen show but little culture now, it was still more 
the case seventy or eighty years ago. Voronezh was once an 
active place, especially in the time of Peter the Great, but it is 
now dull and decayed. Koltsov grew up amid coarse and vulgar 
associations, and received a poor education. Till his death he used 
an ungrammatical style, and his orthography was capricious. 
Prosaic as some of the features of his life were, political acces- 
sories were not wholly absent. He was occasionally sent to tend 
his father's sheep on the steppe, and thus found himself in 
communion with Nature. The account given by his biographers 
reminds us very much of some of the details of the life of the 
Ettrick Shepherd, and the days he spent upon the solitary Scottish 
hills. It is of this steppe that the Russian poet is never weary of 
singing, and he has consecrated to it many of his most beautiful 
poems. His fancies were first stimulated by reading the works of 
Dmitriev, a poet of the classical school, who flourished in the 
interval between Lomonosov and the romantic revival under 
Zhukovski. Soon afterwards he was able to purchase some of 
the works of the Russian poets, but he did not make much 
progress in the art of composition till Kashkin, a good-natured 
bookseller, had given him a work on Russian parody. 

There is a sad love episode in the life of the poet. His father, 






Russia. 103 

although a mere burgher, owned some serfs, and among them was 
a young girl who had grown up in the house, and had become 
half servant and half companion to Koltsov's sisters, and indeed 
there would not be much difference between them in matters of 
education. The girl appears to have been a beauty of the South 
Russian type. The poet fell in love with her, and his passion 
was reciprocated. His father, however, determined to put an end 
to such an attachment, which he thought little conducive to his 
son's interest. He accordingly took advantage of the absence of 
Alexis in the steppe, and sold Duniasha, as she was called, and 
her mother, to one of the landed proprietors dwelling in the district 
of the Don. The father of Koltsov appears in most of his actions to 
have been a hard, money-loving man ; but it is not easy to forgive 
him for this act of brutality. This sad instance of the abuse of 
parental authority occurred when the poet was twenty-two years 
of age. We are told that Duniasha soon fell into a consumption, 
and died through grief at parting. 

In 1835 eighteen of the poems of Koltsov were published through 
the agency of his friend Stankevich, the son of a landed proprietor 
of Voronezh, and the book soon made its way. In 1836 Koltsov 
had occasion to visit St. Petersburg and Moscow, with a view to the 
settlement of some of his father's affairs. It was on this occasion that 
he was introduced to the chief literary lions of the two capitals, 
and the salons of the aristocracy were thrown open to him. The 
memoirs of Koltsov are full of painful details of the constant 
squabbles of the poet with his father, a coarse, selfish old man. 
After his return from Moscow in March 1841, Koltsov first began 
to show signs of that disease which was to carry him off in the 
following year. The disagreeable condition of his life is made 
only too apparent in his letters to the critic Bielinski. Fortunately, 
the poor poet fell into the hands of a kindly and sympathetic 
doctor. Life had, however, become distasteful to Koltsov ; he 
used to say to his medical man, " If my disease is inevitable, if 
you are only protracting life, I implore you not to do so. The 
sooner it is over the better, and I shall give you less trouble." 
On the advice of his medical attendant, Koltsov went to a friend 
in the country, so that he might bathe regularly in the Don, and 
for some time his health improved. " But this improvement," 
remarks Bielinski, "was only deferring death." For the re-estab- 
lishment of his health rest was necessary, and that was denied 
him. As happened in the case of Burns, some of his friends, 
"flies of estate and sunshine," to use the words of George 



104 National Life and Thought. 

Herbert, deserted him in his declining days. The poet died on 
the 19th of October 1842. 

The volume of verse which Koltsov has left us is not great in 
extent, but its contents are valuable. He has all moods, but the 
melancholy one is predominant. And we must remember that 
the sorrows of Koltsov were real ones, and his desponding 
utterances are not like the expressions of Weltschmerz of the 
poets of the Byronic school, who too often show their self-inflicted 
wounds to the world, as mendicants do for an alms. We cannot 
say of him that he is 

"Sad as summer night for wantonness." 

Another poet, whose life has great interest, and gives us a 
genuine picture of Russia, is Taras Shevchenko, the Cossack. 
He wrote a short autobiography, from which I shall borrow some 
incidents. 

He was born on the 28th of March 18 14, in the village of 
Mornitsa, in the Government of Kiev. His parents were serfs on 
the estate of a certain landed proprietor named Engelhardt. He 
has told us that he never knew any happiness after his ninth year. 
He appears to have been a dreamy child, full of strange impulses ; 
thus he was always gazing at the distant mountains, which he 
could see from his village, and thought that they must be iron 
pillars which supported the sky, He accordingly wandered from 
the village to put his belief to the test, and would perhaps have 
been lost if he had not been brought back by some pedlars. 
In the year 1823 he lost his mother ; his father married again, and 
the new wife proved a severe stepmother to the children. Taras, 
with his little sister Irene, who was his constant companion, used 
to go to the neighbouring Lebedinski monastery. Here he saw 
an old monk who had been an eye-witness of the struggle between 
the Malo-Russians and the Poles in 1768. This man had many 
a story to tell of the period, and gave the youth the material for 
his striking poem, Haidatnak. The father of Shevchenko sent 
him for instruction to a certain Hubski, but died soon afterwards. 
The stripling was then intrusted to a drunken priest named 
Buhorski, who treated him with brutal severity. "This was the 
first despot I ever had to deal with," says Taras, in his auto- 
biography, "and he instilled in me for the rest of my life a 
loathing for every sort of oppression which one man can commit 
against another." He also narrates his adventures with two 
other persons of this sort by whom he was instructed, and from 



Russia. 105 

whom he learned something of the art of painting, for they were 
employed in the preparation of icons, or sacred pictures. Thus, 
besides a genius for song, an inclination for art was developed 
in Taras. 

But his fortunes were to undergo a change. In the year 1823 
his old master, Engelhardt, died, and his son and heir took the 
youngster as his page. This new position, although at first it 
seemed to cripple his freedom, was, in the end, advantageous to 
him. His duty was to remain in an ante-chamber, to await the 
summons of his master. The poor youth, to wile away his time, 
was accustomed to copy the pictures hanging on the wall. This 
practice, however, on one occasion, brought him into trouble. 
He accompanied his master to Vilna on the occasion of a festival 
in honour of the Tsar. During the absence of M. Engelhardt 
and his family at a ball, given in honour of this fete, young 
Shevchenko set himself to copy the pictures which were hanging 
on the walls. While the rest of the household slept, the young 
artist secretly rose, lit a candle, and began drawing. He became 
so engrossed in the pursuit that he did not perceive when his 
master returned, and was rudely awakened from his artistic dreams 
by his ears being pulled by the angry nobleman, who terrified the 
young painter by telling him that by his sitting with a candle 
among the papers, he had not only nearly set on fire the house 
but the whole city. The unfortunate Shevchenko received a 
beating. A better time, however, was in store for him. M. 
Engelhardt resolved to send him to a house painter, with the 
idea of employing him on his estate. To a decorator of this sort 
he accordingly went, and luckily found a kind-hearted man. 

In the year 1832, the master of the poet went to live permanently 
at St. Petersburg, and Taras followed with the rest of the servants. 
His talent for painting became more and more developed, and finally 
in 1838 some benevolent men raised 2500 roubles, the sum 
required to purchase him from his master, and set him free. 
Shevchenko now became a member of the Academy of Arts, and 
everything promised a successful career for him. In 1840 
appeared his Kobzar containing a collection of lyrical pieces 
in the Malo-Russian language. But unfortunately, while staying 
at Kiev, he got mixed up with some secret societies, and was 
denounced to the Government. He was sentenced to serve as a 
soldier at Orenburg, on the Asiatic frontier of the empire, and 
remained in exile from 1847 to 1857. His fate was the more 
severe, because he was forbidden to amuse himself with painting. 



106 National Life and Thought. 

He, however, contrived to secrete materials, even carrying a 
pencil in his shoe, and his proceedings were winked at, through 
the good nature of the officer in command. 

The following story is told by the great novelist Turguehiev : 
— " One general, an out-and-out martinet, having heard that 
Shevchenko, in spite^of the prohibition, had made two or three 
sketches, thought it his duty to report the matter to Perovski (the 
commander-in-chief of the district) on one of his days of reception ; 
but the latter looking sternly on the over-jealous informer, said in 
a marked tone, ' General, I am deaf in this ear, be so good as to 
repeat to me on the other side what you have said.' The general 
took the hint, and going to the other side, told him something 
which in no way concerned Shevchenko." 

The poor poet during his captivity lamented his fate in some 
sad poems. But a day of deliverance was at hand. In 1855 the 
Emperor Nicholas died, and soon afterwards Shevchenko, through 
the influence of his friends, was released. He returned to St. 
Petersburg in 1858 ; in the summer of the following year he paid 
a visit to the Ukraine, and saw his sister Irene in her native village. 
But he was so poor, that he was only able to give her a rouble ; 
at that time all the rest of the family were serfs. Towards the 
middle of July he again made his appearance in St. Petersburg, 
and occupied apartments in the Academy buildings. A new 
edition of his Kobzar also appeared. He now became anxious to 
settle down in the Ukraine, but his health was breaking up. On 
the 26th of February 1861, the poet died suddenly in his studio. 
He had expressed a wish to be buried in the Ukraine — 

' ' When I die, one thing I crave, 
Lay me by the Dnieper, 
That his broad and rushing wave 
Lull in rest the sleeper." 

His friends resolved that his wish should be carried out, and 
he was buried in a picturesque spot, in the presence of a great 
crowd of people. In imitation of the old Cossack tombs, a vast 
mound of earth was piled on the grave, which was surmounted by 
an iron cross. This tomb is an object of reverence among his 
countrymen, and a little while ago it was spoken of in one of the 
Polish journals as the Mecca of the South Russian revolutionists. 
I have unfortunately no time for a detailed criticism of the writings 
of Shevchenko. He loves to describe the wild exploits of the 
Cossacks in their independent days. He has in a clever manner 
interwoven with his poems the popular superstitions and customs 



Russia. 107 

of his countrymen, hence his pieces are full of national colouring 
and racy of the soil. 

The Russians began early to write historical novels, under the 
influence of Scott — that wizard whose genius pervaded Europe. 
But it is in the realistic novels of modern life that they have 
been destined to achieve their greatest success. We might per- 
haps say that Nihilism, the exiles in Siberia, the supposed pro- 
gress of the Russians towards India, and the Russian novel are 
the only Russian subjects about which the ordinary English- 
man feels any curiosity. In the stream of realistic fiction the 
Russian mind has flowed ; and this is only what we must expect, 
when we reflect that in the nineteenth century the epic and the 
drama, as forms of fresh creative literature, are dead throughout 
Europe. The novel of everyday life, in its higher development, 
giving scope for fine psychological analysis, is everywhere trium- 
phant. It was introduced to the Russians by Nicholas Gogol 
(1809-1852), a writer of striking talents. As he was a native 
of Malo-Russia, the colouring of his tales is taken from that 
picturesque part of the empire. But even he, great as were his 
merits, hardly during his lifetime succeeded in making himself 
known beyond the boundaries of his native country. This was 
done by Ivan Turgueniev, who died in 1883. Much has been 
written by way of criticism upon the writings of Turgueniev, but 
of his biography little is yet known, especially in this country. In 
the latter part of the year 1884, there appeared in the pages of the 
Russian Review, ■ Viestnik Yevropi, some interesting papers by a 
Madame Zhitov, who had been adopted by Turgueniev's mother 
during her long widowhood. We get from them a curious view 
of Russian domestic life in the earlier part of the century, 
and the sketch forms a fitting pendant to the biographies of 
Koltsov and Shevchenko. 

The mother of the novelist, Barbara Lituvinova, was descended 
from an old and wealthy family. Unfortunately, her mother, who 
became a widow at an early age, married again ; and both she and 
her second husband ill-treated the daughter, for whom she never 
seems to have felt any affection. The poor girl, persecuted by 
her family, at last took refuge with a rich uncle, who treated her 
well in the main, although he seems to have been a man of harsh 
character. With him Barbara remained till his death, at which 
time she was nearly thirty years of age. He left her all his 
property, which was considerable. She soon afterwards married 
Sergius Turgueniev, a man of noble family and handsome appear- 



io8 National Life and Thought. 

ance, according to tradition. By him she had two sons, Ivan 
and Nicholas. Her husband died early, and Madame Turgueniev 
appears for the rest of her life to have vented her spleen and 
melancholy upon the unfortunate serfs in her power. It was from 
what he saw on his mother's estate that Turgueniev drew the 
vigorous pictures of serfdom to be found in his works, especially 
that which was the earliest to become celebrated, Zapiski Okhov- 
nika — The Memoirs of a Sportsman. In his mother's house 
occurred the pathetic incident of the dumb porter — a man whom 
Madame Turgueniev had chosen for the post on account of his 
gigantic stature, and who consoled himself in his desolation by 
the companionship of a dog. His cruel mistress had the animal 
removed, because he occasionally made a noise. Ivan, the future 
novelist, was continually devising means whereby the cruelty of 
his mother to the serfs could be baffled. Thus, when she ordered 
the child of one of her female serfs, whom she employed in 
attendance upon herself, to be sent to another estate, because it 
diverted the attention of the mother from her mistress, Ivan, to 
spare the poor woman's agonies, caused the child to be secretly 
brought up on a part of the estate where the mother could visit it, 
and Madame Turgueniev never discovered the trick which had 
been played upon her. 

She had educated one of her serfs as a medical man. He 
had acquired such skill that his services were in great request in 
the families of the district, when Madame Turgueniev was willing 
to lend them. The serf-doctor was employed to attend the young 
protegee of his mistress (Madame Zhitov) ; but as the little girl got 
no better, Madame made up her mind to send to some doctors in 
the neighbouring town. But the serf, whose name was Porphyry, 
would not agree to this. The rest shall be told in the words of 
Madame Zhitov : — 

' "With his air of imperturbable quiet and heavy step he entered 
the room of his mistress, at the very moment when she was 
writing a letter to invite the physician to attend. 

" ' Do not trouble yourself, madam, to write to any one. I am 
attending the young lady, and I will cure her.' 

" Madame Turgueniev cast her eyes upon him, put her letter 
aside, looked closely at the audacious speaker, and said, 'Re- 
member, if you don't cure her, a journey to Siberia awaits you ' 
— whither in old times rebellious serfs were sent as a punish- 
ment. 

" But this did not trouble our good doctor. He went out of the 



Russia. loo 

room as slowly and quietly as he came, sat behind my bed, and 
never left me day or night till the disease had taken a favourable 
turn. Then, in the same phlegmatic manner, expressing neither 
triumph nor joy (although he was very fond of me), he went into 
the room where he had been threatened with Siberia, and said 
'The young lady is now alive and safe, only it will be some 
time before she is convalescent.' " 

With Turgueniev, Count Leo Tolstoi and Dostoievski (who 
died in 1881) divide the honours at the present day. Tolstoi 
allures his readers by his vigorous portraiture and the strange under- 
current of socialism which runs through all his writings. Dostoi- 
evski has an overpowering realism. This realism in art, which is 
so great a characteristic of the Russian mind, besides appearing in 
the novelists, is conspicuous in the paintings of Verestchagin, and 
also in the poetry of Nekrasov, who died a short time ago. Count 
Melchior de Vogue, who has written a powerful book on the 
Russian novel, says very truly the Russian thinker goes with a 
bound to the depths of things. He sees the contradictions, the 
vanity, the great nullity of life ; and if his artistic temperament 
urges him to reproduce it, he does it with a disdainful impartial- 
ity, at times with a frigid despair, most often with the fatalism 
which is inherent in the Oriental parts of his soul. It is this 
fatalism which makes the Russian accept with such apathy and 
even with apparent cheerfulness whatever misfortunes he finds 
himself compelled to undergo. Thus in spite of his exile and the 
many physical and mental sufferings which he underwent, Dostoi- 
evski returned from Siberia with an unbroken and loyal faith in 
the political and religious institutions of his country. Aksakov 
has told us that once Dostoievski, together with Mackenzie 
Wallace and others, were spending the evening with him, when in 
the course of a conversation on the Emperor Nicholas, the 
novelist warmly eulogised him. After his departure the English- 
man came up to Aksakov and asked, 

" Did you not tell me that was Dostoievski ? ' 

"Yes." 

" The author of Memorials of the House of Death " ? 

" The same." 

" But it cannot be he who was exiled to the mines ?" 

"No other; and pray why not?" 

"Why, how could he eulogise the very man who sent him to 
the galley?" 

"You, as a foreigner," replied Aksakov, "may find it difficult 



no National Life and TJwught. 

to understand, but to us it is intelligible, and is thoroughly 
Russian." 1 

A few words are due about the Russian press. Many of the 
newspapers are known in England by name, but little more. 
Thus there is the Novoye Viemya, the proprietor of which is 
Suvorin, the publisher. At Moscow is published the Russkia 
Viedomosli, probably the most widely circulated paper in Russia, 
edited by Sobolevski, formerly a professor, and the Moskovskia 
Viedomosti, which used to be the organ of the celebrated Katkov. 
There is also the Grazhdaniu. The Golos has, we believe, come 
to an end. 

Of the Reviews, the most noteworthy are the Viestnik Yevropi, 
edited by Stasiulevich, in which some of the novels of Tur- 
gueniev first made their appearance. There is also the Moscow 
periodical, Russkaya Mist, Russian Thought, and to these may be 
added the Russkaya Starina, Russian Antiquary, and Istoricheski 
and Viestnik, both of which are published at St. Petersburg. 
The former is an invaluable magazine to all who study Russian 
history, containing, as it does, articles relating solely to the life 
and thought of that country in previous times. It is edited by 
Semevski. The Istorie/ieski Viestnik has a wider range, inasmuch 
as it includes also the histories of other countries besides Russia. 
The articles are of a very substantial character. It is edited by 
Shubiaski, the author of some very interesting historical mono- 
graphs. 

So vast a subject as Russia it would be impossible to fully treat 
of in a single lecture. All I have attempted to do is to put before 
you some of the landmarks of the history and literature of this 
strange country, which has only lately been studied among us. 

Let us hope, as I have previously said, that Russia may advance 
slowly and safely in the path of constitutional progress, and play 
the great part which she seems destined to do in the history of the 
nations. Nor need any of my hearers be terrified by the bugbear 
of Panslavism, which is so often brandished before us like a red 
rag. There seems to be an idea that Panslavism was invented by 
the Russians, but as every one properly informed on the subject 
knows, such is far from being the case. The first person to start 
the idea was a certain Yuri Krizhanich, a Serb, who was in Russia 
for some time during the reign of Alexis, the father of Peter the 
Great, but from unknown causes was banished to Siberia, and is 
supposed to have ended his days at Tobolsk. His works are full 
1 Turner's Modern Novelists of Russia. 



Russia. Ill 

of interest, and show great acuteness ; he carried his enthusiasm 
so far that he believed in the possibility of a common Slavonic 
language. 

It seems to me impossible that a political union of the Slavonic 
races should ever be formed. That there should be a certain 
amount of sympathy among them is not to be wondered at, but 
language and religion alone will prevent their complete fusion. 
The Eastern Slavs are members of the Orthodox or Greek Church, 
the Western of the Latin ; and each clings to his special alphabet, 
in one case leading to the almost ludicrous result that the Serbs 
and Croats, practically the same people, are divided into two 
families, one of which uses the Latin and the other the Cyrillic 
letters. Nay, we may actually see literary journals, one column 
of which is in Cyrillic, and the other in the Latin alphabet. 
Moreover, although the various Slavonic languages have roots, and 
forms in common — as must necessarily be the case from their 
belonging to the same family — yet the people who use different 
languages are not mutually intelligible. In the same way, show 
an Englishman a page of Dutch or Swedish, and he will immedi- 
ately point out a great many words, obviously the same as English, 
with slight modifications, but we hardly expect to hear an English- 
man engaged in easy conversation with a Swede or a Dutchman, 
unless he has learned their languages. And just as this Panslav- 
istic idea is a mere " scare," so the result of all my reading has 
been to find that the will of Peter the Great "is a fond thing vainly 
invented;" but I have no time to go into a discussion upon it 
here. The subject is far too lengthy. 

In conclusion, I can only say of Russia, in the words of one of 
her own poets, which I have attempted to versify, who is listening 
to the peasant as he sings : — 

"More boldly those songs of half-sadness are flowing, 
And full of a strength that is young ; 
They tell of a soul that triumphant is growing, 
Tho' for years it was tortured and wrung. 

"Maybe, thou hast bowed, native land, 'neath thy sorrow, 
And harsh was thy fortune to bide, — 
But nay — I'll believe not that freedom's glad morrow 
And her songs to these fields are denied." 



k • J 



VII. 

POLAND. 

ADAM GIELGUD. 

IT was, I think, a happy inspiration which prompted the Com- 
mittee of this Institute to include Poland in the series of 
lectures on the European nations now being delivered to you. 
There is certainly no country that has played an important part 
in European history of which so little is known among the 
present generation of Englishmen as Poland. I have often heard 
people, fairly educated people too, ask whether such a nation 
as Poland still exists, and whether the Poles are not the same 
as the Russians. Nor, indeed, is this very surprising. It is now 
a hundred years since, by an act of spoliation unexampled in 
history, Poland was divided among three great powers — Russia, 
Austria, and Prussia — which have exercised every means of 
persuasion and violence to wipe out the Polish national spirit, 
and to assimilate their Polish to their other subjects. A hundred 
years is a long time even in the life of a nation, and only a very 
sturdy and patriotic one cculd have survived this disintegrating 
process, carried out with steady persistence by some of the greatest 
statesmen of Europe, with vast armies, ample funds, and all 
the resources of civilisation at their command. No wonder that 
people conclude that Poland must be dead, and that the Poles 
have accepted their fate and made friends with their rulers, as, 
looking at the matter from a purely material point of view, it was 
obviously their interest to do. 

It is, perhaps, a little singular that a nation which inspired 
English poets, historians, and orators — whose cause was supported, 
within the memory of many now living, by splendid entertain- 
ments, in which the chief members of the English aristocracy, 
with the Duke of Sussex, the Queen's uncle, at their head, took 
a leading part, and by public meetings of Conservatives, Liberals, 
and Radicals, addressed by such representative men as Edmund 
Beales and Lord Dudley Stuart, who may be said to have lived 



114 National Life and Thought. 

and died for Poland — that a nation whose valour and misfortunes 
have been the subject of endless debates in Parliament, and 
nearly caused a war between this country and Russia in 1864 — 
should now be almost entirely forgotten. Possibly this may be 
explained by the advance of what is called materialism. These are 
not times when men's pulses are stirred by such names as Kosci- 
uszko, Garibaldi, and Kossuth. We are a more practical age ; our 
admiration and sympathy are for success, not for misfortune ; 
and Bismarck and Moltke have eclipsed the heroes of our youth. 
The unfortunate, like the absent, are always in the wrong, and 
it has become the fashion to say that Poland fell because she did 
not deserve to live, and that the Poles are a turbulent, imprac- 
ticable race who will never be capable of self-government. Such 
wholesale accusations against a nation are very un philosophical, 
and are generally falsified by events. It is not very long ago that 
the general notion in England about the Germans was that they 
were a nation of dreamers; about the Italians, that they were either 
mere dilettanti or visionary conspirators ; about the Roumanians, 
that they were sunk in luxury and corruption ; and about the 
Bulgarians, that they were ignorant boors with not enough spirit 
to turn out their Turkish oppressors. Yet we now know that 
the Germans and Italians are among the most practical politicians 
in the world, and that Roumania and Bulgaria have not only 
obtained their independence, but successfully resist even the 
bullying of a great power like Russia. The fall of Poland, we 
are told, was to a great extent brought about by her internal 
dissensions. This is undoubtedly true. Internal dissension is 
a bad thing for a country, especially when it is surrounded by 
three great powers who are eagerly waiting for an opportunity 
of pouncing upon her and seizing her territory ; but people who 
look for a reason for the fall of Poland, are too apt to forget that 
countries which are now the greatest and most flourishing in 
the world, have been the scene of internal dissensions as bad as 
those of Poland, though, owing to their more favourable geogra- 
phical position, they have not been punished for them as she 
has been. This has, indeed, for centuries been the chronic 
disease of all Europe. Look at England : from Wat Tyler's revolt 
and the persecution of the Lollards to the wars of the Roses, 
from the wars of the Roses to the blood-stained annals of the 
Tudors and the dynastic civil wars of the Stuarts and the Georges, 
her history has been an almost unbroken succession of internal 
struggles; and even now, though Englishmen have ceased to 



Poland. 115 

settle their differences by the sword, we all know that political 
adversaries in this country attack each other as bitterly in 
Parliament, at public meetings, in the press, and even in the law 
courts, as they ever did on the battlefield. In French history we 
see the risings of the peasants and traders against the nobles in the 
fourteenth century, the civil war between North and South in 
the fifteenth, the thirty years' war between the Huguenots and 
Catholics in the sixteenth, the wars of the Fronde in the seven- 
teenth, and the horrors of the Great Revolution in the eighteenth ; 
Germany had the Hussite war in the fifteenth century, the nobles' 
war in the sixteenth, the thirty years' war in the seventeenth ; and 
the Italians, after the hundred years' war between the Guelphs 
and the Ghibellines, continued to fight each other almost 
incessantly until Italian unity was finally established in 187 1. 

Now no one would be so foolish as to say that the English 
are a turbulent nation incapable of governing themselves, 
because during some three centuries of their history they were 
chiefly occupied in cutting each other's throats. Why, then, 
should this be said of the Poles— unless, indeed, it be that having 
failed to help them, we try to console ourselves for the failure by 
saying that they did not deserve to be helped ? The radical error 
of this view of Polish history is, that it passes a sweeping condem- 
nation on the Poles for faults which were not specially Polish, but 
were those of Europe generally before the great French Revol- 
ution. It is all very well for us in England, at the end of the 
nineteenth century, to hold up our hands in horror on reading 
of the anarchy which prevailed in Poland a hundred and fifty 
years ago. There was plenty of anarchy at that time in the other 
countries of Europe. The condition of Germany, for instance, 
is thus described by one of the most recent of our radical 
historians, Mr. Fyffe, author of the History of Europe: — "A 
system of small States, which in the past of Greece and Italy had 
produced the finest types of energy and genius, had in Germany 
resulted in the extinction of all vigorous life, and in the ascend- 
ancy of all that was stagnant, little, and corrupt. If political 
disorganisation, the decay of public spirit, and the absence of a 
national idea, are the signs of impending downfall, Germany was 
ripe for foreign conquest." Germany, France, Italy, Holland, 
escaped the fate of Poland, not because they were more orderly 
and peaceful, but because they were not, as Poland was, 
surrounded by despotic powers, each with far greater resources 
than herself, which not only coveted her fertile plains, but hoped 



1 1 6 National Life and Thought. 

in crushing Poland to stem the rising flood of liberty on the 
Continent. The truth is, as the poet Campbell indicated in his 
famous lines, that Poland was the victim of her love of freedom ; 
in signing the Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791 — that 
Constitution at whose promulgation Burke said that "humanity 
must rejoice and glory" — she signed her death-warrant. That 
this was the case, is proved out of the mouth of Frederick 
William himself, who, after complimenting the Poles through 
his ambassador on their Constitution, sent an army into their 
country, and justified himself before the other powers by asserting 
that "the principles of Jacobinism were gaining ground in the 
country, and the spirit of the French democracy was taking deep 
root among the Poles." Catherine, less Jesuitical, simply protested 
against the Constitution, and backed up her protest with an 
army of 100,000 men. I will not here give any more details of 
the sad and well-known story of the intrigues of the Fredericks 
and Catherine ; it will suffice to quote the words of our last and 
greatest historian on the subject, Mr. Lecky, who, in his 
History of England in the Eighteenth Century, says : — 

' ' It was the deliberate and systematic policy of Russia and 
Prussia to maintain anarchy in Poland in order that it might 
never rise to prosperity or power or independence. The policy 
of Russia towards Poland was one of cynical, undisguised rapa- 
city; while the King of Prussia not only broke his word and 
betrayed his trust, but took an active part in the partition of the 
defenceless country which he had bound himself in honour to 
protect." I know that Carlyle takes a different view ; but hero- 
worship was one of the defects of that great and rugged genius, 
and he chose his heroes from among the mighty ones of the 
earth, who are not always the noblest or the most generous. 

What I would specially call your attention to is, that Poland has 
from the beginning of her history been the land of liberty, and 
that it was because she was the land of liberty that the 
despotic governments which surrounded her have always been her 
enemies, and have always striven to compass her destruction. It 
is the fashion to blacken the idols and to glorify the villains of 
our forefathers ; and that clever apologist of Russian despotism, 
Madame Novikoff, has probably persuaded many people that 
Poland was not a free country after all, but was ruled by a 
turbulent aristocracy who, when they were not fighting among 
themselves or with the neighbouring States, were chiefly occupied 
in oppressing the peasants. The latest disciple of this ingenious 



Poland. 1 1 7 

lady is, I see, a writer in the current number of the Quarterly 
Review, who affords a good illustration of the ignorance which 
prevails, even among writers in reviews, with regard to Poland. 
With a complacent dogmatism, which is the usual accompaniment 
of imperfect knowledge, he boldly asserts that Poland will never 
again be an independent nation ; that the Poles were politically 
imbecile, because in 1811 they hesitated to join their old enemy 
Russia against France, in whose army there were whole regiments 
composed of their countrymen ; that one of the causes of the fall 
of Poland was the "lowness of the suffrage" (a bad look-out for 
England); and that the Polish nobles were slaveholders. In support 
of the latter assertion, which, as I shall show presently, has no 
foundation in fact, he produces a bit of philology which will make 
those who know the Polish language and people stare. "The 
common appellation for the peasant," he says, "in the language of 
the upper classes (chlop), is equivalent to 'the dirt of the earth.'" 
Now the word " chlop," as any one who has resided in Poland will 
tell him, is the appellation for the peasant used not only by what 
are called the upper classes, but by the peasants themselves. Its 
precise origin is unknown, but it was certainly never equivalent to 
"the dirt of the earth," except in the sense in which bad landlords 
everywhere treat the peasants as the dirt of the earth. The word 
is, indeed, usually derived by philologists from "leb," head, and 
it originally meant the head of the family, the kindred word 
" chlopiec " meaning " boy " to this day. 

But to resume our subject : According to Madame Novikoff, the 
partition of Poland was not a crime, but a good deed, as it put an 
end to the tyranny of the minority over the majority — an assertion 
which sounds somewhat strangely in the mouth of the principal 
advocate of a system of government under which all power is 
concentrated in the sovereign, whose mere word is sufficient to 
consign any one of his subjects — whether innocent or guilty, 
whether a murderer or a political writer — to those horrors of exile 
in Siberia of which we are now again hearing so much, and which 
Mr. Kennan has so graphically described in the Century 
magazine. Now let us look into this charge a little more closely. 
There is a certain air of plausibility about it, for it is unquestionable 
that political power in Poland was, until the passing of the 
Constitution of 1791, entirely vested in the hands of the nobles. 
But here we see the danger of employing words which bear a 
different signification according to the country in which they are 
used. In England a nobleman belongs to a small class of persons 



1 1 8 National Life and Thought. 

with " handles to their names," whose town and country residences 
and ancestry are recorded in Burke and Debrett ; in Poland there 
were no titles of nobility ; and when a man became a noble, he 
simply acquired the right of bearing arms, together with certain 
political privileges, of which the most important was the right of 
voting at elections. Among the nobles were lawyers, doctors, and 
merchants; and a Polish proverb said that "a noble on his field 
is equal to a lord in his castle." 

In the eighteenth century the number of " nobles " in Poland was 
so great that it constituted a fifth of the whole population, which is 
a much larger proportion than that of the people who enjoyed the 
franchise in England after the first Reform Bill. And this Polish 
patent of nobility — the right to take part in the government of the 
country — was not, as with us, given indiscriminately to all who 
were above a certain standard of material prosperity ; it was the 
reward of the peasant for services, civil or military, rendered to 
the State ; in a word, for noble actions. It is absurd, therefore, to 
talk of Poland having been ruled by an aristocracy in our sense of 
the term. The poorest noble, that is to say, the poorest voter, 
had precisely the same amount of political rights as the richest ; 
and to the exaggerated development of political individualism, 
which made every voter an active politician, was partly due the 
anarchy from which Poland suffered. 

I have already stated that the main cause of the partition of 
Poland was that she enjoyed free institutions such as at that time 
were not possessed by any other continental nation. Towards the 
end of the eighteenth century revolution was in the air, and the 
despotic sovereigns of Europe were trembling on their thrones. 
In the midst of them was a country as large as France, with a 
people brought up in the principles of freedom, having the widest 
powers of self-government, and under a king whose power was 
even more strictly limited than those of the present sovereign of 
England. What wonder that the despotic rulers of Russia, Prussia, 
and Austria should have feared that the "canker of liberty," as a 
Russian writer has called it, might spread to their own down- 
trodden subjects? No doubt they were influenced to a great 
degree by the greed of territory; but they were much more 
influenced by the instinct of self-preservation; and Campbell 
and the English statesmen of the time rightly judged that the 
fall of Poland was a deadly blow to the cause of freedom all 
over the world. 

We now come to the second count of the indictment — the 



Poland. 119 

oppression of the peasants. But where were the peasantry not 
oppressed in the eighteenth century ? All modern civilised nations- 
have gone through the same phases of equalisation of the rights 
of the various classes in the State. First, all political power and 
privilege is concentrated in the sovereign ; then some of it passes 
down to the great feudal lords or barons ; then it is extended to 
the professional and mercantile classes ; and, finally, it descends, in 
a very attenuated form, it is true, to the artisans and peasants. 
In the eighteenth century this process was barely in its initial 
stage in every great country of Europe, except England and 
Poland. In Russia all power was, as it is still, in the hands of 
the sovereign, and the peasant was nothing but a slave, as he 
could be sold like a dog, separated from his family, and moved 
about from one estate to another. In Germany and Austria the 
monarch was also practically absolute ; while the peasants, under 
the system known as "Leibeigenschaft," were serfs attached to 
the land and forced to work for the landowners. In Poland, 
much the same system prevailed as in Germany; the Polish 
peasant was entirely maintained by his master, who had consider- 
able powers over him, which were, however, to some extent 
restricted by law and custom ; he had no political privileges, but 
was frequently rewarded by the diets for services to the State by 
being made a noble ; he was obliged to work for his master during 
a certain number of days in the week, and he could not, as in 
Russia, be moved from the estate to which he belonged. That 
the Polish landowners, like those of other countries, often terribly 
abused their power over the peasants is unquestionable. But 
landlords were no better in other parts of Europe, as we know 
from the statements of French and German writers — which may 
be mythical exaggerations, but must have been based on a 
substratum of fact — about such monstrous practices as that of the 
droit du seigneur, and the still more atrocious one of the bauchrecht, 
i.e., the right of the master to warm himself, when hunting on a cold 
day, by stabbing his serf in the stomach and placing his hands 
in the wound. In Poland, at least, the more enlightened people 
publicly denounced landowners who ill-treated their peasants; 
and with the general advance of humanity and civilisation, the 
peasants of Poland have long since shared in the improvement 
which has taken place all over Europe in the relations between 
the various classes of the agricultural population. In 1760 
Count Zamoyski and several other wealthy Polish landowners 
substituted the payment of a money rent for the old system of 



120 National Life and Thought. 

forced labour; and the Constitution of the 3rd of May 1791 made 
the peasants equal to all other citizens in the eyes of the law. 
The relations of the peasant to his master then became those of 
landlord and tenant; and this system worked so well that, 
according to M. de Lavergne, the eminent French economist, 
one-fourth of the property of the country passed into the hands 
of persons not of the noble class, and the value of land 
trebled. Many of the Polish landowners in Lithuania, which 
was then under the Russian government, proposed that their 
peasants should be made proprietors of their holdings ; but the 
Emperor Nicholas steadfastly rejected these proposals, though 
they were made to him by some of the most eminent personages 
in the country. Then came Alexander II., who, after introducing 
peasant proprietorship in Russia, could hardly persist in the 
refusal of his predecessor to grant it to Poland. But an ingen- 
ious method was adopted by which the grant of compensation to 
the landlords was arranged without any expense to the Imperial 
Treasury. The compensation allowed them was fair enough; 
but, at the same time, they were ordered to pay a special tax, the 
amount of which rather more than covered the sum due to them 
as compensation. They were compensated as landlords but 
taxed as Poles. What would our Irish landlords say to such a 
scheme? It would be a very convenient way, no doubt, of 
settling the thorny question of land purchase in Ireland, for it 
would absolutely save the English taxpayer; but the Irish 
landowner would certainly not bear as tamely as his Polish 
colleague had to do, what in England would be called sheer 
robbery, though in Russia it bears the more euphonious appella- 
tion of "an administrative measure." 

But to return to the Polish peasants. In Prussia the peasants 
remained serfs until 1809 ; in Austria until 181 1 ; in Russia until 
1 861; while in Poland they were placed on the same legal footing 
as the landowners in 1794. There could not, therefore, have been 
any reason for political antagonism between the Polish nobles and 
peasants, and as a matter of fact they have always acted together 
in the great national movements which have taken place since the 
first partition. The notion industriously propagated by the ene- 
mies of Poland that the nobles are a class apart from the rest of 
the population, that they alone wish for the restoration of Poland, 
as it would restore to them the privilege of oppressing the peas- 
ants, and that the other classes are content under Russian and 
Prussian rule, is a silly fable which will not stand a moment's 



Poland. 121 

examination. Is it credible, I would ask not only the student of 
history, but any man who knows human nature, that the tens of 
thousands who, from the insurrection of Kosciuszko in 1794 to 
the last disastrous rising of 1863, escaping the vigilance of the 
Russian police, went out at night into the woods to fight for their 
country armed only with a scythe or a knife and stick, and kept 
the whole Russian army at bay for months, belonged to the 
aristocratic class? No, gentlemen, these unknown heroes who 
silently died a soldier's death against the enemy, or disappeared 
from among their relations and friends to linger in the nameless 
tortures of Siberian exile, were for the most part what we would 
call working men, that is, artisans and peasants. Kosciuszko, 
himself a noble, was followed in the memorable rising of 1794 by 
4000 peasants armed with scythes ; and his first achievement with 
this little band was to attack 12,000 Russians near Cracow, who, 
after a battle of five hours, in which the Polish peasants captured 
the Russian artillery and turned it against the enemy, were beaten 
with a loss of 3000 killed and many prisoners. The insurrection 
which broke out shortly after at Warsaw was headed by a banker, 
Kapostas ; a shoemaker, Kilinski ; and a butcher, Sierakovski. 
The revolution of 1830 was begun by the non-commissioned 
officers and privates of the Polish army; that of 1863 by the arti- 
sans of Warsaw. The fact is that in Poland, as everywhere 
else, revolutions were made by the middle and poorer classes, and 
not by the aristocracy, who knew too well the fearful odds to take 
the responsibility of leading the nation to almost certain destruc- 
tion, though when the people had once risen, they cheerfully 
sacrificed their lives and their properties for the cause of their 
country. The working men had only their lives to give, and had 
not even the prospect of leaving to their children a glorious name ; 
but they emulated none the less their more fortunate countrymen in 
the brilliancy of their courage and the purity of their self-devotion. 
Thus we had the noble spectacle of a whole nation struggling 
with its oppressors, never knowing when it was beaten, but 
rising again and again to resume the unequal conflict. 

Nor is it only in insurrections that the peasantry of Poland 
have acted in unison with the other classes of the nation. In the 
Polish parliament of the Austrian province of Galicia, peasants 
sit and speak side by side with landowners, lawyers, and 
merchants — a consummation at which we have not yet arrived 
even in our Parliament at Westminster, since Mr. Arch sat in the 
House as the representative of the agricultural labourer. In 



122 National Life and Thought. 

Prussian Poland, too, the most sturdy opponents of Germaniz- 
ation are the peasants, who at large meetings in the country 
districts have made eloquent speeches protesting against the efforts 
of the Prussian government to suppress the Polish language, and to 
swamp the Polish population by German settlers. 

The result of the elections which have just taken place in Ger- 
many, and which are carried on under a system of universal 
suffrage, shows that the number of Polish deputies in the 
Reichstag has been increased to 16; and although (Prussian 
Poland being an agricultural country) the great majority of the 
voters must have been peasants, the whole of the sixteen deputies 
whom they have elected belong to the class of so-called nobles, 
and one of them is a member of the aristocratic family of the Czar- 
toryskis. The unity shown by these Polish voters, all going like 
one man to the poll to vote for their candidate, is held up by the 
German press as an example to the German voters, who are split 
up into numerous parties, each with its own candidate, and 
whose votes consequently often neutralise each other. 

I may add, to show the growth of the Polish nationality irt 
Prussia, that while in 1881 the number of Polish voters voting for 
Polish candidates was 194,894, in 1890, it was 245,852 — an 
increase of nearly thirty per cent. 

Undoubtedly the political system of Poland was very defective. 
The Poles had the faults of a warlike and high spirited race ; they 
were impatient of restraint, fond of luxury, and demoralised by 
the dissolute manners introduced by their Saxon kings ; and the 
result was a laxity in the machinery of government which in 
the eighteenth century almost stopped it altogether. That this 
did not arise from the incapacity of the Poles for self-govern- 
ment (they had governed themselves for 800 years) was 
proved by the constitution of 1791, which was admitted by the 
greatest statesmen of the time to be the most masterly measure 
of the kind which had yet been devised, and which, if Russia and 
Prussia had not crushed it in the bud, would certainly have 
proved an effectual remedy for the anarchy from which Poland 
suffered. I have shown that in this respect, and in the oppression 
of the peasants, there was at that time no great country on the 
Continent which could have cast at her the first stone. But,, 
it might be said, a mere negative admission of this kind is 
hardly a sufficient justification for a country's claim to exist. 
England, the first home of liberty, " the mother of parliaments," 
the saviour of Europe from the tyranny of Napoleon, the 



Poland. 123 

propagator of civilisation in three Continents ; France, the apostle 
of ideas and literary culture ; Germany, the school of philosophers ; 
Italy, the nursery of the Arts, — all these countries have established a 
right to the gratitude of humanity, and we should all be losers by 
their extinction. What has Poland done for the good of the world ? 

We have all heard that Sobieski saved Vienna from the Turks, 
but it is not so generally known that this event was only one of a 
series of similar ones. Poland had for centuries been the van- 
guard of European civilisation against the incursions of barbarous 
invaders from the East ; and to her it was mainly due that our 
modern Europe was preserved from the withering scourge of 
an Attila or a Brennus. While Russia was groaning under 
the yoke of the Mongols, who utterly defeated her in the middle 
of the thirteenth century, and ruled her with a rod of iron for two 
hundred years, Poland was an insuperable barrier to their advance 
southward, thereby rendering, at the price of her blood and of some 
of her richest towns, which were repeatedly destroyed by the Tartar 
hordes, a service to Europe which can hardly be over-estimated- 
Yet though warlike, the Poles were not aggressive. In the earlier 
part of their history, when they had to build up the Polish State, 
they did it by conquest, as such things are always done. But 
from 1333 to 1587, when Poland was at the highest point of her 
prosperity and greatness, she did not add a single inch to her 
territory ; not once did she make an aggressive war, and though 
there was a great deal of fighting, it was only to repel the attacks 
of the Germans, the Russians, and the Tartars. " Defence, not 
Defiance," was her motto, like that of our Volunteers. And she 
was not only the defender, but the propagator of civilisation. 
As early as the fourteenth century the Poles were celebrated in all 
Europe for their learning and literary culture. Latin was the 
language, not only of the universities and of diplomacy, but of 
good society, and in the Polish Parliament the debates consisted 
of Latin orations worthy of the best period of ancient Rome. 
The University of Cracow, founded in 1364, was attended by about 
15,000 students yearly from all parts of Europe. It was here that 
one of the first printing-presses was established, and the original 
wood blocks of a very early edition of the Bible are still preserved 
there. Copernicus, the great astronomer, and Veit Stoss, the 
famous sculptor of Nuremberg, were both Poles, and did most of 
their work at Cracow ; the best Latin poets of the Middle Ages 
were a Scotchman, Buchanan, and a Pole, Sarbievius. 

I have said that Poland was the land of liberty. The great 



1 24 National L ife and Thought. 

principle of our Habeas Corpus Act, that no man should be 
imprisoned without trial, was the law in Poland so early as the 
fourteenth century. Feudalism did not exist among the Poles; 
there was no vassalage nor holding of the land subject to the 
lord. Personal liberty and the independence of every citizen in 
the State was the leading principle of the social organisation, and 
even prisoners of war became proprietors of the land on which 
they were placed after they had cultivated it. Among the 
freemen, or nobles, as they were called, the feudal idea of 
personal service was unknown ; no man was another man's 
servant, he was only the servant of the State. The result of this 
principle was naturally to give the people a predominating share 
in the government from the earliest ages. The first Polish 
Parliament, composed of the bishops, the high state dignitaries, 
and the freemen of the lower class, met as early as 1331, and for 
two hundred years before that date no decision of any Polish King 
was held to be valid without the consent of his council, composed 
of the leading men in the country. A Prussian once said to a Pole, 
in astonishment at the limited power of the Polish sovereigns, 
"Why, you have no king!" to which the Pole answered, "Yes, 
we have, but your king has you." The drift of public opinion 
on any question of the day was ascertained at conventus or public 
meetings, at which all men freely expressed their opinions, and 
the parliamentary representatives learnt the views of their con- 
stituents. There were three estates of the realm — the King, the 
Senate, and the House of Representatives, or, as we should 
say in England, King, Lords, and Commons ; but all real power 
was in the hands of the House of Representatives. There was not 
a single case of a Polish king rejecting a proposal made by his 
Parliament, or acting in opposition to its wishes. On the contrary, 
the Polish kings often had to listen to some very plain language 
in the House of Representatives, where they were obliged to be 
present during the debates. In 1459 King Casimir II., after 
opening Parliament, was thus addressed by one of the deputies : — 
"Sire, our calamities are notorious, and you are the author of 
them. If the nation had not been protected by Providence, it 
would have perished. We have been obliged to demand the 
convocation of the present assembly in order to ask for reform ; 
we are your subjects and your sincere friends, but we deplore 
your hostility to our country, and we are not afraid of saying so, 
in spite of the army you have brought to coerce us. We demand 
your protection for those who claim justice ; we ask you to cast 









Poland. 125 

off your indolence, to show that you are a man, and are ready 
and willing to defend the country against its enemies. If 
you do this, you may reckon on our fidelity, we will hasten to 
obey your orders, we will sacrifice our fortunes for you and the 
State, and we will watch over your happiness ; if not, you may 
rely upon it that we will not give the smallest part of our wealth 
to assist you." This threat to refuse supplies soon brought the 
king to his senses, as similar threats have done in English history. 
Even the great Sobieski, during a debate in which he was accused 
of intriguing to appropriate to himself property belonging to the 
State, was addressed by one of the deputies in these bold words, 
''Sire, either reign justly, or (ease to reign." What a contrast 
between this free country, where r.ny man could speak his opinion 
of the government and criticise the sovereign to his face, and its 
neighbour Russia, even in this nineteenth century ! After the 
speeches I have just quoted, it is curious to read the account 
given in the Times last December of the late General Trepoff by 
an Englishman who lived at St. Petersburg when the General was 
chief of the police there. " He was a typical specimen," says the 
writer in the Times, "of the Russian military despot, and the 
policemasters of other Russian towns set themselves to imitate his 
example. When he walked along the streets, the cabmen took off 
their hats and crouched before him with fear. . . . When the Czar 
returned to his capital after a long absence, Trepoff drove at a 
gallop in front of his Majesty through the crowded streets, stand- 
ing erect in his open carriage, glaring round with knitted brows, 
and commanding the people to cheer." 

Such a scene would be impossible in any other European 
country except as an incident in a burlesque, yet it is not un- 
common in Russia, where you constantly hear people of the most 
unblemished reputation speak with bated breath of the power of 
the police ; and one can only account for the submission with 
which the Russians bear so outrageous a state of things, by the 
assumption that they must have had the spirit of independence 
and self-respect, which is the natural birthright of every man, 
knocked out of them by seven centuries of barbarous and 
tyrannical government. I have not a word to say against the 
Russian people — they are kind-hearted, intelligent, and intensely 
patriotic ; they have a fine literature, and they have shown wonderful 
enterprise and determination as soldiers and administrators; but 
they are to be pitied for having a detestable government, and 
for not having the spirit to shake it off. 



126 National Life and Thotcght. 

To return to our subject — There were two other points in 
which Poland was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries far 
ahead of any other country in the world. These were religious 
freedom and freedom of trade. While the Huguenots were being 
massacred in the streets of Paris; while in England, France. 
Spain, men were being dragged by hundreds to the stake and 
the scaffold for their religious opinions; while the Jews were 
being hounded out of nearly every country in Europe, Poland, 
though the great majority of her people have always been 
devotedly attached to the Roman Catholic Church, opened her 
gates to the persecuted of all creeds. 

"The people of Poland," wrote an Italian traveller in the 
fifteenth century, " have among them a multitude of Jews who 
are not, like in most countries, reduced to a life of misery as 
usurers or menials. Several have fields and offices of their own, 
in which they transact business as merchants; others adopt 
literary and scientific pursuits, chiefly astronomy and medicine. 
The Jews in Poland often become rich and celebrated, and are 
treated on the footing of freemen ; there is no distinction made 
between them and Christians ; in fact, they are in all respects on 
a footing of equality with the other inhabitants of the kingdom." 

The Protestants, after the Jesuits had obtained a footing in 
Poland, were under certain disabilities, like the Roman Catholics 
in England up to the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Bill 
in 1829, but they were never persecuted as the Protestants were 
in France, Germany, and Austria, and they were admitted to the 
franchise like all other freemen, which was not the case with the 
Catholics in England before the Emancipation. 

One of the chief articles of the pacta conventa, or contracts 
made by the Poles with their kings on their election, was, that no 
person should be oppressed on account of his religious opinions, 
and that full liberty should be accorded to every man in Poland 
to practise the rites of his religion. It was on account of this 
stipulation that Henry of Valois, Duke of Anjou, when the Poles 
sent a delegation to Paris to offer him the Polish crown, hesitated 
to accept it, as he had just been fighting the Huguenots. But the 
Polish delegates declared that if he did not agree to the stipulation 
he would not be their king ; and it was only when he thus became 
convinced that he could only get the Polish crown by binding 
himself to give equal rights to the members of all religions that he 
gave way. Lutherans, Calvinists, Greek sectarians, Mahomedans, 
Armenians, and Jews flocked into Poland, where alone they could not 



Poland. 1 27 

be molested on account of their creed ; and you can now see in the 
Tudor Exhibition in Regent Street the portrait of the Duchess of 
Suffolk, who, being a Protestant, fled from the persecution of our 
Catholic Queen Mary, and was received with the utmost kindness 
by the Catholic King of Poland, who gave her an estate, where she 
lived until the accession of Queen Elizabeth enabled her to return 
to England. 

As regards freedom of commerce, it was England that chiefly 
profited by the free admission of foreign goods into Poland. A 
treaty of commerce was concluded between England and Poland 
so early as 1386, under the reign of Richard II. In the fifteenth 
century great numbers of English and Scotch merchants settled in 
Poland, and established their offices there. In 1579, under the 
reign of Queen Elizabeth, a British Eastern Company was founded 
for the purpose of trading with the ports on the Baltic ; and a letter 
from the Queen to King Sigismund of Poland, dated Greenwich, 
1 6th January 1589, is still extant, in which she begs the king to 
extend his protection to British trade in his dominions. So 
friendly, indeed, were the relations between England and Poland, 
that in 1650 the Polish Parliament decided specially to relieve all 
English merchants in Poland from the payment of taxes, in order 
to enable them to pay a contribution of 10 per cent, on their 
incomes which had been imposed by the Government of Great 
Britain, and which was duly handed over to the British Minister 
•at Warsaw by the Polish tax-collectors for transmission to London. 
Another treaty was concluded by Queen Anne in 1707, for the 
purpose of acquiring very advantageous commercial privileges for 
English trade with the Polish harbour of Dantzig ; and this treaty 
was fully confirmed by Article 13 of the Treaty of Utrecht in 
1713. The Poles were, however, always opposed to monopolies, 
■even when they would have been highly advantageous to the 
Polish Treasury. Thus Philip II., King of Spain, offered to pay a 
very large sum for the exclusive right of buying corn and wood from 
Poland, but his offer was rejected. The rule was to treat all foreign 
states alike as regards commercial privileges, and England was the 
only exception to that rule. The consequence was, that in the eight- 
eenth century the trade of England with Poland was greater than 
it was with France. From 1697 to 1773 tne trade of England with ^ 
Poland amounted to ^22,65 1,901, while that of England with 
France was ^19,013,818. Burnett, in his View of the Present State 
rf Poland, 1807, says — " England is the best customer of Poland. 

. . . Almost every article of manufacture imported is either 



128 National Life and Thought. 

really or nominally English. Having occasion to buy a hat at 
Lemberg, I found the name and ticket of a well-known London 
hatter, on it, though I perceived plainly that it was of foreign 
manufacture." 

After the partition, owing to the obstacles imposed by Russia 
and Prussia on Polish trade, all commercial relations between 
England and Poland ceased ; when part of Poland gained a sort 
of autonomy after the Congress of Vienna, they revived; and 
when her liberties were finally extinguished by the Emperor 
Nicholas, her trade with England also disappeared. Indeed, this 
sympathy between England and Poland, for centuries the only 
two great nations in Europe that were free, is of very old date, 
and it was a common practice with the wealthy families of Poland 
to send their sons to complete their education in England, where 
they studied constitutional law at Oxford, and witnessed some of 
the most memorable debates in English parliamentary history at 
St. Stephen's. 

I have, I think, now shown what Poland has done for mankind. 
She protected Europe from Tartar invasions ; she alone for many 
centuries held high the banner of freedom amid the despotic 
States of the Continent ; she was the patron of learning and the 
arts ; she was the refuge of all who were oppressed on account of 
their religious opinions ; she was the first State that practised free 
trade, a system which, though in some countries it may be in- 
applicable, has undoubtedly been of great advantage to the world 
at large. I have shown you what Poland was; I will now 
endeavour to show you what she is. Among the historical fables 
which, though they have been amply proved to be untrue, are still 
generally believed, is the saying " Finis Polonicz ! " — Poland is no 
more — which was put into the mouth of Kosciuszko at the time 
when, himself wounded by the Russians, he saw his faithful 
followers being cut down by the conquering enemy. I do not 
know whether the similar saying attributed to Lord Chesterfield 
after the capitulation of the Duke of Cumberland's army to the 
French in 1757 — " We are no longer a nation " — was as fictitious 
as that alleged to have been uttered by the Polish hero. But of 
one thing I am quite certain, from my personal knowledge of the 
country — that Poland is still living; is indeed very much alive. 
Her population has nearly doubled since the partition a hundred 
years ago; it is now 31-i millions. The number of Polish news- 
papers and other periodicals published in Poland is nearly 300 ; 
of Polish books, 150c a year. The Poles have a very varied and 



Poland. 1 29 

extensive literature, but it is almost entirely occupied with national 
subjects, and is therefore not of much interest to people of other 
nations. Their greatest writers, however — Mickiewicz and 
Krasinski among the poets, and the contemporary novelist 
Sienkievicz — have been translated into all the European languages. 
Two of their painters, Mateyko and Siemiradzki, stand in the front 
rank among artists of the Continental schools ; and among the 
chief singers at the opera in London within the last few years 
have been the two Reszkes, Mierzwinski, and Madame Sembrich, 
all Poles devoted to their country. Notwithstanding the obstacles 
imposed by the Russian frontier authorities on importation and 
exportation, there has in Poland been a considerable development 
of trade and industry. The chief articles of export are wood, 
meat, skins, and eggs. The country is mainly agricultural, but 
the exports of wheat have much diminished, owing to the compe- 
tition of the United States and other non-European countries. 
There is, however, a large manufacturing industry; the number 
of workmen employed in manufacturing establishments, in coal 
mines, and on the petroleum oil wells in Galicia, is about 200,000. 
The chief articles of manufacture are textile fabrics, employing 
45,000 workmen ; machinery ; beer ; spirits ; and sugar ; and the 
total value of the manufactures of Poland is about ^35,000,000 a 
year, not an inconsiderable sum for a country whose industry on 
the greater part of its territory is impeded at every step by a 
Government whose object is to crush the Polish nationality at any 
price. 

The tyranny of the Russian government is indeed a byword ; and 
when Mr. Chamberlain in 1885, and Mr. Gladstone in 1888, 
compared the conduct of the government in Ireland to that of the 
Russian Government in Poland, they doubtless considered that 
no comparison could be more opprobrious. I am not going to 
say one word about the Irish question; this is not a political 
meeting, and party politics would be out of place in a lecture 
which deals mainly with facts and not with arguments. But I 
would point out that any comparison between the system of rule 
in Ireland and that in Poland must be fallacious, because the 
circumstances are entirely different. Poland lost her independence 
at the end of the eighteenth century, when she was a civilised State 
and one of the great powers of Europe ; Ireland was conquered in 
the twelfth century, when all the countries of Europe were more or 
less barbarous, and Ireland not the least. Poland has a language 
and a literature of her own, not inferior to those of the most 

1 



130 National Life and Thought. 

■cultivated nations ; the Irish language has practically disappeared, 
and the language of all educated Irishmen is English. In the 
Polish province of Lithuania, the Poles are fined for speaking Polish, 
and any person teaching the Polish language is subject to a fine of 
300 roubles (^30) or two months' imprisonment ; if Irishmen paid a 
fine each time they spoke or taught English, what a handsome source 
of revenue it would be for the Treasury ! In Russian Poland a Pole 
is not allowed to buy land. In Ireland the government assists the 
Irish tenants to become proprietors by purchase of their holdings. 
In Russian Poland a man suspected of conspiracy against the 
government is seized in his own house in the middle of the night 
and dragged away without trial of any kind to Siberia, where he 
may linger for years without his family knowing what has become 
of him. In Ireland there is at least no secrecy ; the man is openly 
tried by a magistrate, and we have long ceased to transport our 
criminals, political or other, to distant parts of the Empire. Again, 
in Russian Poland whole villages of peasants have, by a liberal use 
of bribes, and failing these, by shooting down all objectors, been 
converted, as it was called, en masse to the Russian Church, and 
members of other religions are impeded in every way in their 
business and family relations, so that many Jews have found it worth 
•their while to pay fifty roubles to a priest to make them orthodox 
Russians. I need hardly say there is nothing of the kind in Ireland. 
Finally, in Russian Poland not a word can be printed in any 
newspaper or book without the permission of the government, and 
English newspapers often arrive with whole columns ruthlessly 
obliterated with printer's ink when they contain any remarks likely 
to be disagreeable to the Czar or his officials ; while in Ireland, as 
you know, the most violent fulminations against the government 
in the Pall Mall Gazette or the Star are admitted without even a 
pencil remonstrance in the margin. 

In a word, there is not a single point in which what is most 
characteristic of Russian rule in Poland exists in Ireland. 
Whether the government in Ireland is bad or good is quite another 
question ; all I say is that that government is utterly different from 
the government of Russia in Poland, and that the two things 
cannot be compared. We are, happily, a free country (though we 
don't seem to appreciate the blessing as much as we used to do), 
and it would be absolutely impossible for any English Government, 
however bad, to do in Ireland what the Russian Government 
is doing in Poland. 

The oppression of the Poles in the German part of Poland is, 



Poland. 



131 



of course, not so barbarous ; but it is far more insidious. There 
is a show of constitutional government, as Polish deputies sit in 
the Prussian and German parliaments ; but they are naturally, as 
the representatives of three-and-a-half millions of people out of the 
fifty millions that constitute the German Empire, in a small 
minority ; and the German majority have cheerfully voted, under 
the inspiration of the wily Bismarck, laws for the exclusion of the 
Polish language from courts of law and schools in Prussian Poland, 
and large sums of money for colonising with Germans estates 
vacated by Polish proprietors. These ingenious schemes, however, 
are not so successful as was hoped by their promoters. Not being 
allowed to have their children taught Polish in the schools, the Poles 
in Prussia have them taught at home ; and every number of every 
Polish newspaper published in Prussia contains in large capitals 
an exhortation to its contributors to teach their children Polish. 
The attempts of the Prussian Government to settle Germans on 
Polish land, too, are counteracted by a bank, founded by Poles 
from all parts of Poland, which helps landowners when they are 
in financial difficulties, and bids for Polish estates that are in the 
market so as to prevent their getting into German hands. 

One of the strongest witnesses to the vitality of the Polish 
nation is the great Bismarck himself, who, in a speech which he 
made in the German Parliament, declared that the three-and-a- 
half millions of Poles in Prussia constitute a danger, by their 
indomitable patriotism, to the vast German Empire ; that they are 
much more prolific than the Germans ; and that, when a German 
marries a Polish woman, he almost always becomes a Pole himself — 
not a very cheering prospect, one would think, for the promoters of 
German colonisation among the Poles. His statement is, how- 
ever, perfectly true. Like France, England, and other vigorous 
European nations, Poland has a force of assimilation which draws 
to itself the members of other nationalities living on its soil; 
and experience shows that Ruthenians, Lithenanians, Germans, 
and Jews, residing on Polish territory, become Poles not only in 
language, but in national feeling. Poland, like England, is made 
up of many races ; but it is one nation, with the same history, the 
same literary language, the same literature, and the same political 
traditions. 

I have mentioned above that the greater part of Poland is still 
under governments which use all the immense power at their 
command to crush out the Polish nationality. There is a small 
part of Poland — the Austrian province of Galicia — where a more 



I3 2 National Life and Thought. 

humane and enlightened policy is pursued. This province is not 
small in itself, for its area is 29,937 square miles, and its popula- 
tion six millions, but it is small compared with the whole of 
Poland, whose area is 300,000 square miles, somewhat larger 
than that of France, and whose population is thirty-one and a 
half millions. Now Galicia, though relatively not so rich in. 
industrial establishments as Russian Poland, is a very fair 
illustration of what Poland would be if it were independent. 
Since Austria lay at the feet of Prussia after the disastrous war of 
1866, the western half of the empire has been organised on the 
federative principle, and Galicia practically governs herself, 
subject to the central authority at Vienna, where she has a 
minister and delegates of her own. It is interesting to see 
how this Poland in miniature is governing herself. She has a. 
council of administration and a parliament, with Polish officials,, 
a Polish university, and other local institutions which are just the 
same as if she were an independent State. To judge by the- 
statements of the enemies of Poland, who represent the Poles as- 
h-redeemable revolutionists and anarchists, one would suppose 
that Galicia is a sort of cockpit of political factions all fighting 
together, oppressing the peasants, and without the slightest regard, 
either for law or order. But what are the facts ? The Galician 
Parliament, or diet, is composed of men of all nationalities, classes, 
and religions. Jews, Ruthenians, united Greeks, peasants, sit side by 
side with Roman Catholics, Poles, great landowners, and professors. 
Yet the debates in the Polish Parliament, though they are often 
very animated and show plenty of party spirit, are conducted with 
an order and regularity which might serve as a model for several 
representative assemblies nearer home. Poles and Ruthenians 
quarrel a good deal — there was even a duel between a Polish and 
a Ruthenian member the other day, on account of a speech made 
by the former in the House — but there is no obstruction, no 
"talking against time," no disturbance of the order of debate by 
frivolous motions whose only object is to wear out one's opponents. 
And as to respect for the law, there is no nationality in the Austrian 
Empire which is so law-abiding as the Poles. Crime is rare, and 
the streets of Cracow and Lemberg are much safer than those of 
Vienna or Prague. Owing to the poverty of the country, ex- 
hausted by incessant wars and the oppression of former Austrian 
Governments, trade is not very flourishing, but the petroleum 
industry is gradually developing itself, and it would become a 
mine of wealth to any foreign capitalists investing in it. The. 



Poland. 



133 



want of capital is, indeed, the chief obstacle to the development of 
Galicia, which is very rich in natural resources, and the con- 
struction of railways, of mills, of dyeing establishments, and of 
manufacturers of textile fabrics on a large scale would be very 
profitable. 

And finally, as to the political capacity of the Poles, who have 
never been wanting in statesmen, I need only mention the fore- 
most, next to the Prime Minister, of the members of the Austro- 
Hungarian Cabinet, M. Dunajevski, the Minister of Finance, who 
is universally acknowledged as a man of extraordinary ability, 
endowed with the highest qualities of statesmanship, and by his 
skilful management of the Austrian finances has now for the first 
time for many years produced a budget with a surplus. 

We have now seen the past and the present of Poland. What of 
her future? To prophesy in politics is foolish and dangerous, 
but the field of speculation is wide, and stranger things have 
happened than even the restoration of Poland, the only great 
historical country (now that Hungary, Italy, and Greece are free) 
which still lies in bondage. What a blessing it would be to 
humanity if " the canker of liberty " could be made to revive in 
Northern Europe, and by eating away the accumulated slough of 
centuries of despotic rule, leave the great Russian and German 
nations free to pursue their natural development — if a nation like 
Poland, independent, high spirited, not aggressive, but with the 
highest qualifications for self defence, and nurtured in traditions of 
freedom from its infancy, could show the Russians that servility, 
with her handmaid corruption, is a curse, and the Germans that 
there are higher things to strive for than mere empire — if there 
would then be an end of the Russian greed of conquest, carefully 
fostered by the Russian officials in order to divert the minds of 
the people from the scandalous abuses and oppression of their 
government at home ; and if the nations of Europe, relieved of 
the incubus of Russian aggressiveness, were enabled to reduce 
those enormous armaments which are among the most crying 
evils of our time ! You will say that this is a dream ; but the 
dreams of nations sometimes come true, and the friend of liberty 
will never despair of Poland ; for if the world's progress is not a 
mere phrase, Time and Education, the great levellers, must 
gradually undermine the great absolutisms of the Continent, and 
Poland will surely then be called to resume her place and her 
beneficent mission among the fraternity of European nations. 



■VIII. 

ITALY. 

J. STEPHEN JEANS. 

IT is not too much to say that no nation of either ancient or 
modern times has played so distinguished a part on the 
stage of history, has had a more varied and chequered career, 
has contributed more to the advancement of laws and learning, 
arts and sciences, commerce and colonisation, than Italy. There 
is not an inch of her soil that is not classic; there is not a 
hamlet, village, or town in her whole extent that has not its 
story of pillage and slaughter, resistance to oppression, feudal 
customs, priestly tyranny, high purposes, and noble achievements. 
"The rude forefathers of the hamlet" have often, in Italian 
history, lit beacon fires of freedom that have been reflected 
throughout the world. Italian art remains the envy and the 
despair of the art of all other nations and of all other times. 
Italian jurisprudence, whether in the form of Roman law, or 
in the later phases of mediaeval codes adapted to altered 
conditions, has been the foundation on which most of our 
legal precedents rest even to the present day. Italian navigators, 
Columbus, Marco Polo and his brother, and their antetypes, 
have been the pioneers of travel and commerce all the world 
over. Italian liberty, as enjoyed by the Free States of Venice, 
Florence, Genoa, and Lucca, has been the basis of later political 
systems that recognise equality before the law as the first principle 
of just government, and have upon that foundation reared a 
superstructure that is indestructible. Education and literature 
have been equally under obligation to Italian minds. The 
Universities which were founded at Bologna, Naples, Padua, 
and other Italian cities were the forerunners, and in many 
cases the types of those that have since been able to achieve 
perhaps a more illustrious name in other lands. The great libraries 
of the Vatican and of the Florentine Republic preceded by 
many years the establishment of most of the other libraries of 



136 . National Life and Thought, 

Europe. Municipal Institutions are equally indebted to this 
remarkable country. Buried for generations in the grossest of 
superstitions,, and under the most galling tyranny, municipal 
freedom every now and again, even while the unbridled license 
of personal rule seemed to be the only alternative available for 
the whole of Europe, assumed a certain definite form which at 
least kept it alive, and interposed some sort of check, however 
feeble and ineffectual in the main, to the autocracy of the Popes, 
the dukes, and the other powers of the period. Eager in the 
pursuit of commerce, and adventurous beyond nearly every 
other nation, the citizens of Florence, followed by those of 
Venice and Genoa, established some of the first trading com- 
panies and guilds for mutual protection and the advancement of 
material interests. In an age when railways were not, before the 
principles of road-making were understood as they now are, and 
when engineering was almost entirely neglected elsewhere, the 
Italians not only provided themselves with excellent roads, but 
with navigable waterways as well, of which the Canal between 
Milan and the Ticino is one of the most striking examples. The 
Roman aqueducts, whereby water supplies were conveyed to the 
towns and villages from the adjoining hills or mountains, are 
masterpieces of art and of engineering skill, and many of them 
are in constant use even at the present day. The architectural 
skill and taste of the early Italians is attested by many examples, 
alike in churches, palaces, and other buildings, scattered up and 
down the face of the country, and making the Italy of to-day 
perhaps the most interesting land to visit that the world can 
show. These are but a few of the considerations that throw a halo 
of romance around the name of Italy, and compel the admiration, 
if not the adoration, of all time. 

In undertaking to speak of such a country, the difficulty is, of 
course, to know how and where to begin. But as we must 
begin somewhere, and as it is necessary to a correct appreciation 
of the subjects to be afterwards dealt with that we should have 
the position and form of the country clearly in our minds, I may 
at once proceed to say that Italy is mainly a peninsula, to 
which is added the large islands of Sicily and Sardinia, the 
island of Elba, and about sixty-six minor islands. It has a total 
area of nearly 111,000 square miles, or about 12,000 square 
miles less than the United Kingdom, while its population at 
the last census amounted to about thirty millions, being about 
eight millions less than that of our own country. 



Italy. 1 37 

One of the most striking physical features of the country is its 
immense length in proportion to its breadth. The total length 
of the Peninsula is about 700 miles, but its breadth in some 
places does not much exceed 20 miles. This, of course, involves 
another remarkable physical characteristic — namely, the ex- 
ceptional extent of coast line, which in Europe is only equalled 
by that of our own country, and amounts for the mainland to 
about 2000 miles, and for the islands to nearly 2000 miles more. 
Another prominent feature of the country is that it is traversed 
throughout the greater part of its length by the chain of the 
Apennines ; and as its northern limits are formed by the chain of 
the Alps, which separate it from France, it is obvious that the 
country must have a considerable extent of mountainous territory. 
This is not only the case, but it is the case to so considerable 
an extent, that less than one-half of the total area is under 
cultivation, so that relatively to her size, Italy can hardly be 
regarded as a productive country in the same sense as that term 
may be applied to the much more prolific and densely-populated 
countries of Belgium and Holland. 

In a country extending from north to south through ten degrees 
of latitude, there must be a great difference of climate due to 
position alone ; but besides that, the climate of Italy is influenced 
by the proximity of the lofty mountain ranges referred to in some 
of its divisions, and by the influence of the air from the sea, which 
almost surrounds the other parts. If we follow the classification 
of Saussure, we may divide the climate of Italy into four regions. 
The first extends from latitude 46.28 to 43.30, and thus com- 
prehends the whole of the Austrian and Sardinian dominions, and 
the other territories to the north of the Apennines, with Bologna, 
Ferrara, and Romagna. In this region the quicksilver in 
Reaumur's thermometer descends to ten degrees below zero ; the 
lagunes at the mouths of the rivers are frozen ; and sometimes in 
January and February the snow remains from ten to fourteen days 
on the ground. Delicate plants do not grow except in sheltered 
situations ; but the mulberry trees flourish, and rice is grown. The 
slight night-frosts appear in November, and some years as late as 
April. Even in summer a benumbing cold is brought down from 
the Alps by a violent storm of northerly wind. The second region 
extends from 43.30 to 41.30, comprehending Tuscany, Lucca, the 
Papal States, the Abbruzzis, and the whole of the western shore to 
the south of the Apennines, though some part of the latter does 
■ extend as far north as 44, but, from being sheltered by the moun- 



138 National Life and Thought. 

tains, has a climate similar to the southern part. This is the 
appropriate climate for the growth of the orange, the lemon, and 
the olive ; but even in this region the snow is occasionally to be 
seen on the fields. The third region extends from 41.30 to 39, 
and comprehends the greater part of the continental dominions 
of the former kingdom of Naples. Here snow is rarely seen, 
and never remains ; the quicksilver seldom falls below three 
degrees, and all plants of the agrumenous tribe flourish in the 
open air. The fourth region extends from 39 to 35.50, and 
comprehends the southern part of Caiabria and the island of 
Sicily. The quicksilver rarely falls below zero, and snow and 
ice are unknown except on the summits of the mountains. The 
tropical fruits come to perfection in the open air, the sugar-cane 
flourishes, the cotton plant ripens, the date trees are seen in the 
gardens, and the enclosures of the fields are formed by aloes. It 
will be obvious that this classification cannot be universally 
applied, and principally attaches to the flat land of Italy. 

Thus the positions on the sides of high mountains, the vicinity 
of the sea, and the volcanic nature of the soil, all have an 
influence which must cause many local variations in any classifica- 
tions, and form exceptions to what is generally correct. The 
tops of the Alps in Savoy and Piedmont are covered with perpetual 
snow. 

The Apennines are also commonly clothed with snow from the 
middle of October till the beginning of April ; and on the highest 
mountains of Abbruzzo, the Majella, and the Velino it remains 
from September till May. 

The northern part of Italy, including Tuscany and the Papal 
States, does not generally present that charming aspect which 
people from the North picture to themselves of the garden 
of Europe ; and they are only introduced into that region on 
proceeding to the east from Manfredonia, or to the west 
from Terracina. There the winter is scarcely colder than our 
September; vegetation proceeds without interruption; and the 
air is filled with the most aromatic odours. 

There are many ways of writing history. If I were called upon 
to give you, in an hour's lecture, a historical sketch of the 
development of Italy, I should probably be expected to occupy at 
least one-half of that time with references to the rulers who had 
at one time or another misled, oppressed, and deteriorated the 
people. But I do not so read the functions of history. The 
nations of the world are no doubt very much what their rulers. 



Italy. 139 

make them, but they are also largely responsible for the making of 
their rulers. In my view, the ruler of a nation is the embodiment 
for the time being of the acts, aspirations, and characteristics of 
the people over whom he wields authority. That is no doubt the 
case to a much larger extent now than it was in former days. It 
is due to the electric telegraph, the newspaper press, the railway, 
and other modern institutions, that a national sentiment can be 
diffused and acted upon much more quickly than formerly. One- 
man power is now only wielded so long as it is permitted. The 
will of the people is the potent and sovereign factor; not the 
will of the ruler, who is only their temporary mouthpiece and 
agent. 

The real circumstances of a country are, therefore, to be sought 
for not in the pomp and pageantry of courts, nor the tread of armed 
men, nor the incidents of a campaign, nor the personal relations 
of different sovereigns ; but in the typical features of race, climate, 
social condition, physical powers and attainments, degree of well- 
being, stability, endurance, and growth of the means that make 
for civilisation and improvement. Of all these, so far as ancient 
Italy is concerned, and, to a large extent, as regards modern Italy 
as well, there is less absolute and complete knowledge than we 
could wish for. An occasional ray of light is projected across the 
dark surface of mediaeval times, but the glimmer is short, un- 
certain, insufficient. We know much of the rulers and their ways ; 
of the habits, feelings, hopes, and condition of the people, only 
very little. But we can imagine more than we actually know. 
For hundreds of years Italy was not the cockpit perhaps, but 
certainly the chief battlefield of Europe. The opening of the 
Christian era found Italy the centre of Roman power, with wars 
and revolutions on hand in almost every quarter of the then known 
world. A hundred years later, and it was still the same. Rome 
was at war with Parthia, Media, Armenia, and other States ; the 
Christians were undergoing their third persecution ; the philoso- 
phers were being expelled from the Imperial City ; and con- 
spiracies, heresies, and schisms were rampant on every hand. It 
was the same old story, with an infinite variety of detail, both of 
scene and circumstance, until in 476 an end was put to the 
Western Empire of Rome by the deposition of Augustus. There- 
upon began the long night of the Middle Ages. Italy was delivered 
over to the rule of a Scythian chieftain ; Odoacer was placed in 
supreme power by a revolt ; and for a long time the country was 
controlled by bands of foreign and licentious mercenaries. 



140 National Life and TJwiight. 

In speaking of the history of Italy, we do not, of course, mean 
to refer at any length to the history of ancient Rome, which has, 
for our present purpose, a very limited interest. It has been well 
observed that the history of Rome and the history of modern Italy 
are no more related to each other than a tragedy is to the after- 
piece. Not only the nations and their language, not only manners 
and morals, laws and gods, have given place to others ; not only 
the monuments of men have been swept from the face of the land, 
but the land itself, its general aspect, and its very climate are 
changed. 

The history of Italy since the old Roman Empire perished by 
inanition, and was overrun by the hordes of northern barbarians, 
may be divided into six distinct eras or epochs, which I shall 
briefly summarise. 

I. The period of the Middle Ages, a.d. 568 to 1183, the age 
of the fathers of the Church, of the monkish chroniclers of the 
Middle Ages, of the theological and philosophical universities 
founded by Charlemagne and his successors, of the sources of 
modern institutions, manners, and feelings, arising from the contact 
of the rude but active temper of the northern conquerors, with the 
more enlightened manners of the conquered, and of the new 
religion of Christianity, which, displacing the Paganism of the 
ancient Romans, and the idolatrous worship of the Goths and 
Greeks, levelled the distinctions of caste and race, and provided 
the germs of a new morality. 

II. In the second epoch the Italian republics were in the full 
plenitude of their power and greatness, controlling and admin- 
istering the commerce of the world, and establishing principles of 
freedom and independence which tended to promote arts and 
letters, to excite energy and enthusiasm, and to get rid of tyranny 
and feudalism. In this age Genoa, Pisa, and Venice shared 
between them the empire of the seas ; Milan and Florence were 
the workshops of the then known world. This was the epoch of 
Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo ; of Colonna, Strozzi, and 
Dandolo ; of the Cabots, Amerigo, and Columbus ; of Dante, 
Varchi, and Macchiavelli. 

III. and IV. The third period, which extended from 1434 to 1748, 
has been described as that of Italian principalities, of domestic 
tyranny ; when the noble families of Este and Medici achieved a 
splendour and maintained a state that contrasts sharply with the 
simplicity of the republics which they superseded ; while the fourth 
period, which, to a large extent, overlaps the third, and extended 



Italy. I4I 

from 1530 to 1789, has been described as that of foreign dominion 
or the age of decline; an age during which the French, the 
Spaniards, the Austrians, and the Swiss were by turns invited and 
expelled by the Italians themselves ; an age that witnessed the long 
struggles of Venice against the Ottoman powers, the wars of the 
House of Savoy against France and Austria, and frequent revolts 
against inquisition and despotism. During this period literature 
was all but dead ; it was a literature of Inquisitors and Jesuits, of 
fetters and fagots. 

The fifth period of modern Italian history brings us down to the 
year 1848, and embraced the stirring times of the French Revolu- 
tion. This period was distinguished by a long peace under the 
tardy and sleepy rule of the Austrians, during which the rigours of 
the Inquisition were entirely got rid of, and many political and 
religious reforms were introduced, not, however, without much 
pressure, as evidenced by the revolutions of Naples and Turin in 
1820, and the insurrections of Modena, Parma, and Romagna 
in 1 83 1. 

Finally, we come to the era of unification and regeneration, of 
which we shall speak later on — the period of valour, trial, and 
triumph, with which we associate the names of Victor Emmanuel,, 
Garibaldi, and Cavour. 

Hitherto we have said but little of the Italians themselves. We 
must now endeavour to see what sort of people they are and 
were. 

Most prominent among the sons of Italy are the Lombards, who 
have for many centuries inhabited that vast tract of country which 
lies between the Alps and the Apennines, down to the Adriatic 
Sea — the richest part of the Peninsula, with a fertile soil and a 
healthy climate. The Lombards, unlike the Southern Italians, are 
distinguished by fair hair and complexion, comparatively large 
stature, a sanguine temper, and an enterprising and active habit of 
mind. They have always been the most prosperous among the 
races of Italy, and have been conspicuously successful in agricul- 
ture, commerce, and industry. 

The Genoese are the descendants of the fierce Ligurians, and, 
until recently, at all events, had to a great extent escaped foreign 
admixture. They are a hardy and thrifty race, and have for 
generations enjoyed the reputation of being the best sailors on the 
Mediterranean. This characteristic has naturally produceda race 
of rovers and adventurers, who have navigated and, to a large 
extent, settled in the four quarters of the globe. 



142 National Life and Thought. 

Very different to the Genoese are the inhabitants of Tuscany — 
a soft, gentle, and highly refined people, of elegant but effeminate 
features, and slender frames, who have made Florence for many 
centuries the ruler of arts and letters, and have produced a 
greater number of eminent men than all the rest of Italy put 
together. 

The island of Sicily, and the southern parts of the Peninsula, 
were early settled by Dorian colonists, who imparted to the 
inhabitants of the seaboard a more or less Grecian character, with 
schools, games, poets, and philosophers, which rivalled those of the 
Fatherland. Both claim that the character of the Neapolitans is 
essentially Greek, although the calamities of the feudal system, of 
the Provencal, Spanish, and Austrian yokes, and of the tyranny 
and troubles that they have endured from other sources, have 
tended to sadden them, and modify their Grecian levity and play- 
fulness, their taste for sophisms and specious arguments, their 
delight in national dances and festivals. 

The inhabitants of Calabria, on the other hand, are a mixed 
race, very different from those of Tuscany and Piedmont. Traces 
of Greek, Norman, German, French, and Spanish blood may be 
found among them, and they have little in common with their 
neighbours, whether as regards their race, their character, their 
history, or their national aspirations. 

When we remember that all these various elements of race and 
blood had been for centuries warring against each other; that 
Milan and Pavia, Pisa and Florence, Naples and Palermo, Venice 
and Verona, had been rival cities, with different rulers and 
systems of government, with opposite and opposing interests, with 
few traditions or memories in common, with bloody grudges and 
long-cherished antipathies, the work of Italian unity, which was 
commenced less than half a century ago, and is now an accom- 
plished fact, would seem, on the first blush, to be the merest 
chimera. 

External circumstances were apparently leagued against the 
consummation of this ideal to a still more serious extent. Italy 
had a powerful and jealous neighbour in France, who, whatever 
her professions may have been, could hardly be expected to favour 
the rise of a great and independent Italian kingdom, which should 
assume its due place in the councils of Europe, and be a for- 
midable rival in those waters which France desired for herself. 

Another very near neighbour, the kingdom of Austria, held 
Venetia by the title of treaty and the possession of nearly seventy 



Italy. lA? 

years, and there could be no united Italy without Venice. The 
creed of the great mass of the Italians was that without Rome 
there could be no Italy ; but Rome was held by the Papal troops, 
aided and abetted for a time by the legions of France, and the 
Pope had, besides, at his back, the prescriptive authority of 
centuries and the countenance of Christendom. Although 
subjected to the galling yoke of an infamous tyrant, Naples 
looked coldly on the project of Italian unity, and did but 
little to advance it, while the King himself bid defiance to those 
who sought his deposition. Garibaldi, eager, daring, and 
impetuous, was likely to precipitate a crisis by engaging in a war 
with Austria for the liberation of Venetia, which could hardly 
have been regarded with favour by the rest of Europe. On the 
other hand, there was the possibility that if the King appeared 
backward in the cause of Italian unity, Garibaldi would join 
with Mazzini, and set up a Republic at Naples. Finally, there 
was the jealousy of all the other states and provinces of Italy at 
the ascendency of the star of Victor Emmanuel and Sardinia. 

When, therefore, the captivating cry of " Italy for the Italians " 
was raised, its realisation appeared to be unattainable in the face 
of the difficulties to which allusion has been made. That it should 
be realised through the House of Savoy and the kingdom of 
Sardinia was wildly improbable. That State had an area of only 
29,500 square miles, or about one-fourth of that of Italy as a whole; 
while its population was very little above four millions, being only 
one-fifth of that of the consolidated kingdom proposed to be 
established. Victor Emmanuel, however, knew what he was about. 
He engaged with the Western Powers in the struggle against 
Russia in the Crimea, without any imaginable cause of war, and 
thus forced his kingdom and his personality into prominence. The 
times were, moreover, ripe for a change. From the kingdom of 
Naples, with its area of 43,000 square miles and its population of 
7,500,000, down to the little republic of San Marino, with its area of 
forty-four square miles, and its population of only 8400, the govern- 
ments that ruled in Italy were unsatisfactory, and their tenure of 
power was unstable. The question was, What should supply their 
place ? It was all very well to speak of Italy for the Italians ; but 
it was well said that " since the time of the Roman Empire there 
had never been a time when Italy could be called a nation, any 
more than a stack of timber could be called a ship." Besides, 
even if it had been otherwise, the problem arose, " Who was to bell 
the cat ? " To realise the fruition of the aspiration, there must be 



144 National Life and Thought. 

insurrection against established Italian governments, or the over- 
throw of Italian dynasties. In other words, it appeared to be 
inevitable that one independent state, as then constituted, should 
foment insurrection in the dominions of another. A parallel case 
would be the invasion of Saxony or Bavaria by Prussia, under the 
pretext of securing " Germany for the Germans." 

Such was the position of affairs when, in November 1859, by 
the Treaty of Villafranca, Lombardy was, under one instrument, 
ceded to France, and by another was ceded by France to Sardinia. 
The area of Lombardy, then held by Austria, was 18,450 square 
miles, and its population was 4,279,000, Milan being the capital. 
Insurrection in the island of Sicily in the following year led to the 
deposition of the king ; and, a few weeks later, Garibaldi assumed 
the dictatorship of the island in the name of Victor Emmanuel. 
This secured for the House of Savoy the control of three-fourths 
of Italy. The conflict with the Papal States and the termination 
of the temporal government of the Pope followed. Italy had 
practically become Italia Irredenta when, in 1870, the capital was 
transferred to Rome, the Eternal City, upon which, as Cavour 
expressed it, " five-and-twenty centuries have accumulated all- 
glorious memories, as destined to become the splendid capital of 
our Italian kingdom." 

I have spoken of a body who are known as the Irredentists. 
This is the name given to a political organisation formed in 1878, 
with the avowed object of freeing all Italians from foreign rule, and 
of reuniting to the Italian kingdom all those portions of the Italy 
of old which have passed under foreign dominion. The operations 
of the "Italia Irredenta" party are chiefly carried on against 
Austria, in consequence of the retention by that Empire of Trieste 
and the Southern Tyrol. Until these territories have been 
relinquished, Italy, or at least a certain part of it, will remain 
unsatisfied. Whether this may, in the near future, precipitate an 
Austro-Italian war is, of course, a moot point ; but in the meantime, 
at all events, Italy and Austria are good friends, and lie down 
together under the sheltering wing of Prince Bismarck. 

It would hardly be proper to pass from the consideration of 
Italian history without making some reference, however incidental, 
to the part which has been taken in the record by the Papacy. I 
do not hesitate to say that, in my view, that part has made wholly 
for evil. I say this alike of the system and its professors. You 
cannot, indeed, separate the two. If we go back to the earlier 
centuries of the Christian era, we find that the Papacy was dis- 






Italy. 145 

tinguished chiefly for its grasping covetousness and assumption, 
under the guise of religion, of powers and prerogatives to which it 
had no claim. In a stand-up fight between any two interests or 
systems, as between any two persons, a fair-minded man would 
naturally desire that there should be an entire absence of " fear, 
favour, or affection," and that both sides should have a fair chance. 
But the Papacy never did, and, in the very nature of the case, 
never could give its opponents a fair chance. It has an armoury 
of spiritual weapons to which they cannot possibly resort, after its 
temporal means of defence or defiance have been exhausted. It 
works upon men's hopes and fears with regard to the future. It 
has encouraged and profited by superstition, and has made full 
use of that fearful engine of oppression — the holy Inquisition — 
through whom it has martyred countless thousands in every nation 
in Europe. Its sacerdotal pretensions have not been more absurd 
and offensive than their application has been iniquitous. All this, 
however, might have been borne if the character of the popes and 
the priesthood had been above reproach. A bad system may, 
indeed, have good and righteous apostles, and the most holy zeal 
may be enkindled and applied on behalf of a lie. But in the case 
of the Papacy there has been grave fault to find with the personal 
character of its leaders. Many of the popes have been notorious 
for their depravity. Where their authority has been divided, as it 
was on several occasions during the Middle Ages, they have proved 
their human frailty by abusing one another like so many Kilkenny 
cats. One Pope even stooped so low as to earn part of his income 
by the licensing of brothels. They have often cast in their lot and 
influence with tyranny and wrong where the course of right and 
charity lay clearly marked out before them. They have placed 
under a ban many of the most potent agencies of modern civilisa- 
tion, including the printing press and the railway system. They 
have claimed an authority over the consciences of men which 
nothing could possibly justify. And, finally, when their temporal 
authority was assailed, they have ranted like the fishwife whom Dr. 
Johnson spoke of as an individual. Pray do not let me be mis- 
understood. I am far from seeking to make an attack upon the 
Roman Catholic Church as such. That Church has, perhaps, as 
much cause to be satisfied with itself and its work as any other. 
On that I express no opinion. But I do unhesitatingly say that 
the influence of the Papacy upon Italy from first to last has not been 
salutary ; and but for that influence, Italy would probably have 
become a united and homogeneous kingdom much sooner than it 

K 



146 National Life and Thought. 

did. At the same time, we would be ungrateful did we not 
remember that some of the popes have been equally distinguished 
for piety and learning, and have done good work alike for art and 
for literature. 

We have seen that the task which Italian statesmen have suc- 
cessfully accomplished has been that of uniting the many 
conflicting interests of the different States and Duchies already 
named, with their divided authorities and unconformable financial 
arrangements, into one compact, united, and consistent whole, 
subject to the same supreme temporal head, with identical 
political laws and institutions, and with a prestige and strength 
sufficient to place it in the fifth or sixth place among the great 
powers of Europe. All this has been accomplished in the face of 
the most determined opposition, alike of temporal and spiritual 
powers, with slender financial resources, with lukewarmness on 
the part of a large section of the population, and with very limited 
co-operation on the part of other states. The heroes of the 
achievement have been Garibaldi, Cavour, and Victor Emmanuel. 
Their labours have borne fruits that could hardly have been 
anticipated, and England rejoices at the result. The vow which 
Victor Emmanuel took after the crushing defeat of Novara in 
1S49, Per dio V Italia Sara ("Italy shall be"), has been fulfilled. 
Something, however, remains to be dene. " Italy is made, but 
who will now make the Italians?" This question, originally pro- 
pounded by Massimo d'Azeglio (who was Prime Minister of 
Sardinia before Cavour commenced his great work of Italian 
unification), has not yet been satisfactorily answered. Italy is 
poor ; she is burdened with an enormous debt ; her armaments 
are large and costly ; her people for the most part are imperfectly 
educated ; her death-rate, notwithstanding that she has the finest 
climate in Europe, is exceptionally high ; her commerce is of 
limited dimensions; her industries are few in number, and fail in 
the majority of cases to compete with those of more Western 
nations. All this is only what might be expected under the 
circumstances. A kingdom is little more than a geographical 
expression, which may be called into existence to-day, and blotted 
out to-morrow. A people are what their circumstances make 
them; and if, as in the case of Italy, those circumstances have 
been inauspicious throughout a long course of years, the processes 
of elevation and amelioration are likely to be slow, and perhaps 
tedious. 

One of the most unpromising features of the recent history of 



Italy. 147 

Italy has been the great increase of her national debt. Between 
1858 and 1868 the national expenditure of Italy rose from 20^- 
to 47f millions; and in 1872, two years after the final touch 
had been given to the consolidation of the kingdom by the occupa- 
tion of Rome, the expenditure had increased to 54! millions. 
The present annual expenditure may be put at about 70 millions, 
which is only 10 to 15 millions under the expenditure of a rich and 
prosperous country like the United Kingdom. Much of this 
■expenditure has perhaps been wasteful, and a great deal may have 
been unnecessary. A state like Italy, which has been consoli- 
dated by frequent appeals to the sword, and as the ultimate result 
of force, cannot halt by the way to consider cheeseparing econo- 
mies, nor can it easily restore the balance between revenue and 
expenditure. That balance, in the case of Italy, was for many 
years on the wrong side. The task of adjusting the two sides of 
the account, difficult even in a rich country under ordinary cir- 
cumstances, demanded, in the exceptional circumstances of Italy, 
that expedients should be adopted that pressed with severity upon 
the people. The duties on salt and tobacco had to be increased. 
Additional taxation was imposed on postage, on petroleum, on 
•corn, and on colonial goods generally. State lands were sold, 
.and fresh Treasury bonds were issued. The usually oppressive 
grist tax had to be increased. Lotteries, at all times an unsatis- 
factory source of national revenue, had to be resorted to again 
.and again, and in some years produced close on 4 millions 
sterling. All incomes were made liable to taxation, those derived 
from manual labour as well as those from capital and rentes. 
Manifestly, therefore, Italian emancipation has not been purchased 
without entailing grave inconvenience, much suffering, and not a 
little permanent hardship and sacrifice on the part of the people 
generally. But there is no evidence that the sacrifice has been 
unwillingly borne. On the contrary, as all the world knows, it is 
the ambition, and apparently the fixed determination, of Italy to 
become and to remain one of the great powers of Europe, able to 
hold her own in the councils of the nations, whether in war or in 
peace. With this end in view she maintains a vast army and a 
powerful navy, which Avould be likely to give a good account of 
themselves in any issue that could possibly arise to demand the 
arbitrament of the sword. It is questioned whether this force is 
needed to secure Italy from external attack and preserve internal 
peace. But Italian statesmen appear to deem it indispensable 
that their country should be equal to meeting any force likely to 



148 National Life and Thought. 

come against her, whether by land or by sea. Nor must it be 
forgotten that Italy has some reason to regard her powerful neigh- 
bours with distrust and suspicion. Nations have long memories. 
Austria is not likely to forget the humiliating circumstances under 
which she was compelled to cede the greater part of Lombardy 
in 1859, and Venice in 1866. Recent events in Africa demon- 
strated the constant liability to misunderstanding and rupture 
with France. The opening of the St, Gothard Railway places- 
Italy at a greater peril of invasion from Germany. The relations 
of the Italian Government and the Pope are not yet so satisfactory 
as could be desired, and there is even now a question of wounded 
amour firopre, which increases the strain. All these considera- 
tions appear to justify the Italians in their demands for a strong 
army and navy; but these can only be purchased at the price of 
considerable sacrifices on the part of the people generally; and so 
long as this policy is adopted as expedient or necessary, so long 
will the material prosperity of the country be retarded. 

Indeed, the ordinary taxpayer in this country can hardly form 
any idea of the crushing character of the burden of taxation 
which the Italian peasant and mechanic are required to bear. 
Taking the national and the local taxation of Italy together, the 
revenue that has to be raised annually amounts, as I have just 
stated, to about ^70,000,000, or, roughly, 50s. per inhabitant. 
This sum is not nearly so large as that which has to be provided 
in the United Kingdom and in France. But then the national 
income of Italy is incomparably less than that of either of these 
two countries; and when we come to apply the test of income, or 
ability to support taxation, it comes out that in Italy the taxes 
represent 20 to 25 per cent, of the national income, as compared 
with only 10 per cent, in the United Kingdom, and 14 to 15 per 
cent, in France. Not only so, but in the United Kingdom, and 
to a less extent in France, the incidence of taxation is so contrived 
as to press with but little severity on the great mass of the popu- 
lation, whereas in Italy taxation is levied largely upon the 
necessaries of life and the incomes of the poor, so that the most 
abject destitution cannot purchase exemption from its baleful 
demands. 

In considering the important and pressing problem of how the- 
effects of this crushing taxation can be mitigated, one question 
that will naturally be uppermost in the minds of Italian econo- 
mists is that of whether more can be made than is made at 
present of the produce of the soil. The great point to be 



Italy. 149 

•determined is whether the country is adapted to growing with 
advantage crops that will return a better ultimate result than 
those that are generally cultivated at present. The time has 
gone by when a nation required to be self-contained in all the 
essentials of existence. Independence of outside supplies of 
food is no longer the shibboleth of political and fiscal reformers. 
In all the other countries of Europe, as in Athens of old, 
external sources of supply are now called in. It has been 
demonstrated that in most of those countries the cultivation of 
wheat and some other cereals cannot be followed with advantage, 
in the face of the severe competition of the United States, India, 
.and one or two other countries. Italy is among the countries 
which do not grow sufficient wheat for their own wants. She is 
also, despite the remarkable climate with which Nature has en- 
dowed her, among the nations that have, relatively to population, 
.a low income from the soil. The agricultural product of Italy per 
head of the rural population is calculated at less than ;£n, or 
only about one-half of that of our own country. This is due to 
a variety of causes, some of them remediable, others the reverse. 
The cultivable area of Italy is relatively less than that of most 
other European countries. This defect of sterility of soil is one that 
cannot be cured. The average yield of the corn and other crops 
of Italy is also exceptionally low. The difficulty of providing 
for adequate rotation of crops, fertilising the soil, and applying 
scientific husbandry, is probably the chief among the preventable 
causes. The system under which the metayer holds and culti- 
vates his farm is one that has a tendency to leave much to be 
desired in this respect. He is not, like the French peasant, the 
proprietor of his little farm, but holds it on a lease from a large 
landowner, to whom in too many cases he is under heavy 
pecuniary obligations, and with whom he divides his produce in 
varying proportions. Hence the frequent origin of difficulties of 
which we have had recent experience in our own country in the 
agrarian troubles of Ireland and the Crofter's agitation in the 
north of Scotland. 

The part which Italy has played over the occupation of 
Massowah may be regarded as a pledge that she means to continue 
in fact, as well as in name, one of the great powers of Europe. 
It will be remembered that when Egypt evacuated the Soudan, 
Massowah, which was a portion of Egyptian territory, fell into 
the possession of Italy by force of arms, although the town was 
claimed by the Abyssinians as the natural port of their country. 



150 National Life and Thought. 

England has concurred in the Italian occupation, presumably 
because we did not desire that the natives should be in posses- 
sion. Neither Turkey nor the other great powers have, however, 
recognised the part taken by Italy in this matter, and it is held 
by eminent jurists that the claims of Italy cannot be maintained 
in international law. France has actively intervened against the 
Italian occupation, and at one time it looked as if this inter- 
vention would lead to an open rupture. France, however, 
not having any real interest in Massowah, has not proved her 
objections so far as the point of the sword, feeling assured, 
no doubt, that if she did, Germany, which has countenanced 
the action of Italy, would have supported that power. In 
such a case, of course, France would have been embroiled in 
a war with Germany and Italy, and could hardly have hoped 
for victory. 

The fear now is, that having been so successful both in their 
arms and in their diplomacy, the Italians may deem themselves 
invincible, and rush upon a conflict that will reduce them to a 
much lower rank among the great powers than that which they 
now occupy. The Massowah matter appeared to indicate that 
Italy would not be averse to trying conclusions with France,, 
hoping thereby, no doubt, to secure a firmer footing on the Red 
Sea and in the East, as well as to come abreast of that power in 
the European family. A country that has, like Italy, a great and 
unsatisfied ambition, is usually liable to attempt more than its- 
strength will justify. Behind Germany, Italy could, no doubt, 
make a good fight, but single-handed her chance of success in a 
war with France is not very bright. Her political and diplomatic 
prospects are at present, however, tolerably reassuring. She is a 
member of the Austro-German alliance, and may count upon the 
co-operation of these two empires in the event of her prestige 
being assailed. 

It will be perfectly evident from the short sketch I have 
attemped of her history, that during the last half century Italy 
has been the most fortunate of European powers. She has 
advanced from the position of a congeries of petty states, with 
no cohesion, unity, or real strength, to a power of the first rank,, 
with interests in the East, and a voice in the settlement of inter- 
national affairs. She has fished in troubled waters, and has 
succeeded in obtaining many concessions and advantages where 
she might just as readily have met with resistance and 
annihilation. She engaged in the Crimean War, and thereby 



Italy. 1 5 1 

laid the foundations of an alliance with France, which, however 
much she may now affect to disregard its results, has in reality 
been of great use to her, seeing that it secured Lombardy and the 
Duchies for Victor Emmanuel, and a little later, Naples and the 
Papal States. By the war of 1866 she added Venetia, and by 
the war of 1870 she secured possession of Rome. 

Italy has shown within recent years that her rulers fully 
appreciate the great importance of the development of her 
material resources by the construction and efficient maintenance 
of public works. The part which Italy has taken in the con- 
struction of the St. Gothard tunnel, and in thereby improving 
her intercourse with the rest of Europe, is sufficiently well known. 
The railway system of the kingdom has also been advanced with 
remarkable strides for a kingdom that has so limited a store of 
wealth and so comparatively small a traffic. The ports and 
harbours of Genoa, Venice, Naples, and other leading towns 
have been put into a creditable condition of repair; and it is 
now proposed to increase the maritime resources of the country 
by canalising the classic Tiber, and by constructing a canal 
right across the Peninsula for a distance of 180 miles, with a 
view to avoiding the long journey round Cape Lucca. The 
latter enterprise, if it is ever carried out, is estimated to involve 
an expenditure of some twenty millions sterling, and it would 
also involve the draining of two large lakes — those of Bolsena 
and Thrasimene. 

Italy, as we all know, has been justly celebrated for the liberal 
and enlightened part which she has always taken in advancing 
academic and scientific institutions. Many of the sciences were 
greatly developed there before they had obtained even a foothold 
elsewhere. And it is not without interest to recall the fact that 
although many of our schools and universities are even still 
hesitating whether they should admit ladies to degrees and 
professorships, and while women are still excluded from seats 
in the Commons House of Parliament, the Academy of Sciences 
in Bologna, as far back as 17 12, not only admitted ladies as 
members, but gave them professors' chairs. In that famous 
school of learning it is still remembered with pride that nearly 
two hundred years ago Anna Manzolini was professor of anatomy, 
and Laura Bassi was celebrated for her knowledge of the abstruse 
sciences. As there were at that time some 550 academical 
institutions of the kind in Italy, the country may fairly be 
reckoned the nursery, as well as the depositary, of many of 



3 5 2 National Life and Thought. 

the arts and sciences that have since blossomed into the noonday 
•emulgence of nineteenth century practice. 

The Italy of modern times has been a strange compound of 
ignorance and superstition, of coarseness and refinement, of 
religion and impiety, of liberty and the most galling yokes, of 
toleration and intolerance. The same Italy that was founding 
the academy of sciences at Bologna, originating the modern 
school of xylography, drawing up the statutes of the Cosmo- 
graphical Academy at Venice, advancing by the establishment 
•of several learned institutions the cause of economic science, 
and enfranchising the serfs in Savoy, was, through the Pope, 
denouncing Freemasonry, expelling the Jesuits, and confiscating 
their property, and practising the terrors of the Inquisition. 
But the lamp of science, although it often burnt dimly, was 
never wholly extinguished. While Genoa was being besieged by 
the Imperialists, Beccaria was making those electrical experiments 
which tended to lay the foundations of the modern science of 
electrical engineering. While the people were sunk in the direst 
misery from the ravages of a prolonged war, the first chair of 
political economy was being established at Naples, and a new 
code of laws was being issued by Charles. While the finances of 
the country were in a frightful state of disorganisation, and the 
great bank of Genoa was being declared bankrupt, Herculaneum 
was being disinterred from the ashes which had overlain her 
temples for nearly one thousand seven hundred years, and a 
meridian arc was being measured by Boscovich and Le Maire 
from Rome to Rimini. Truly these Italians were a versatile 
people, and such as they were, such mutatis mutandis they are 
in our own day. 

If we were asked to furnish a notable example of the truth of 
this latter statement, we should point to the crushing load of 
taxation which the people appear to bear without a murmur in 
order that their country may take the place to which they aspire 
in the family of nations ; to the existence of the galling system of 
conscription, which requires every male to serve in the army, 
unless subject to physical disqualification ; and to the risks that 
they appear prepared to undertake in order to maintain their 
national prestige. Italy has really little interest in any part of the 
world outside of her own borders ; and if she limited herself to 
these, it is exceedingly probable, now that her relations with the 
Papacy are more cordial, that she would escape molestation from 
any outside quarter. But, as we have seen, she is prepared to 



Italy. 153 

run the most fearful risks — even that of being utterly annihilated 
and wiped out — for the sake of so trivial a mess of pottage as 
the colonisation of the dreary desert port of Massowah, at the 
same time that she is building up a solid and substantial basis of 
prosperity and permanence at home. To my mind, Italy seems 
to have just as much business with Massowah as Tenterden 
Steeple has with Goodwin Sands, and her chances of profiting 
thereby are about equally remote. It is a well-known principle in 
human affairs that the less a man has to lose, the more ready he 
is to lose it. Italy has not so much to lose as some other 
European powers ; but that which she does possess has been pur- 
chased at the cost, and by virtue of, many sacrifices, great endur- 
ance, patience, and heroism, unlimited loyalty and devotion to 
the present dynasty. She now acts as if she were ready to 
throw all these, and much besides, upon a reckless cast, and 
stand the hazard of the die. 

The condition of the people of Italy is still unhappily far 
from prosperous, although it is much more satisfactory than 
formerly. Less than half a century ago, a writer who knew some- 
thing about the country, described the circumstances of the 
inhabitants in the following terms : — 

" The greater part of the population of Italy is to be seen in 
the country devoted to the pursuits of agriculture. A few, a 
very few, of them are in circumstances of moderate affluence ; a 
few more may be represented as in a state of comparative ease, 
enjoying a bare sufficiency to support life ; but the great body, 
to whom all others bear a slight proportion, are in the most 
wretched condition. They are the occupiers of small portions of 
land, some of them not exceeding an acre in extent, and most 
of them less than four acres, where, in miserable hovels, barely 
sheltered, they labour in the fields, and subsist, themselves and 
their families, on half the produce of the land, the other half 
being delivered to the proprietor at the time of harvest as his 
rent. Their food, simple as it is, is far from being sufficient to 
keep them in a healthy state. They taste neither bread nor 
animal food. Their chief subsistence is called polenta, made 
from Indian corn, which is merely pounded and then boiled, no 
expense on account of the miller or the baker being incurred. 
This kind of meal, made to the consistence of hasty pudding, 
would certainly be an aliment sufficient to support life when the 
quantity could be adequately supplied ; but, with the utmost 
parsimony during the whole year, the termination of it, as the next 



154 National Life and Thought. 

harvest approaches, often finds them utterly destitute, and with 
no other resource but beggary or starvation. This is the con- 
dition of the larger class of human beings in the north and middle 
of Italy ; whilst in the south the lazzaroni of Naples are living 
proofs of the wretched condition of great numbers in that more 
fertile soil and more temperate climate." 

I have left myself but little time to speak of the political 
institutions and systems of government which obtain in Italy,, 
although I can hardly altogether leave these unnoticed. 

The legislative authority of Italy rests with the King and two 
Chambers — the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. The former 
(unlimited in number) is composed of princes of the royal house 
after attaining their majority, and of members nominated for life 
by the King. The Chamber of Deputies is elected by seratin de 
liste, by conditional universal suffrage for periods of five years, 
and contains 508 members, or one to every 57,000 of the popula- 
tion. For electoral purposes, Italy is divided into 135 districts, 
which again are sub-divided ; one-eighth of the inscribed electors 
must vote to render an election valid. The present Chamber of 
Deputies was elected on May 23rd, 1886, a dissolution having 
been decreed by the King on April 27th. 

The division of parties in the Italian Chamber is unusual. The 
majority, and the bulk of the minority alike, profess Liberal prin- 
ciples ; the one being known as the Ministerial left, and the other 
as the Opposition left or Pentarchists. There is, besides, but little 
difference in their political programmes. The Opposition includes 
some minor groups of varying tendencies, a knot of advanced 
Republicans or Socialists, and the so-called Moderates. There is 
little or no union in the Opposition ; and it is this that has con- 
stituted the chief strength of the Ministerial left, which after 
successfully surviving some nine or ten Ministerial crises, has been 
uninterruptedly in power for twelve years, a result in a large 
measure due to the skilful leadership of the late Signor Depretis. 
On the death of the latter on July 29th, 1887, the ministry under- 
went no change ; as a matter of form, its resignation was tendered, 
but was withdrawn at the request of the King, Signor Crispi taking 
over the Presidency of the Council in addition to the Portfolios of 
the Interior and of Foreign Affairs. Since his advent to power, 
Signor Crispi, although an old Garibaldian, a Republican, and a 
professed friend of France, has been the loyal and devoted servant 
of the monarchy ; and so far from disturbing Italy's relations with 
Austria and Germany, as the Irredentists fondly hoped, it has 



Italy. 155, 

remained for him to definitely cement the alliance of the Central 
European Powers. In spite of Parliamentary differences, however, 
on one point Opposition and Ministerialists are alike united — 
namely, in the desire to maintain the present Savoy dynasty, which 
they regard as the keystone of Italian unity. So far as present 
appearances go, that dynasty has a great future before it. We 
must all hope that nothing may occur to mar the fortunes of so 
august a house, or of so spirited, capable, self-denying, and patriotic 
a people as that over which it presides. 



IX. 
SPAIN. 



PROI'ONGO ALGO V CON'CLUVO NADA. 



MRS. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM. 



THE Portuguese have a word called "saudade," which means 
a longing after, a desire to see some long unvisited place, 
some long unseen face. It seems, if the following story is true, 
that one feels these " saudades " even in heaven itself. 

Adam got weary of Paradise, and asked leave, if only for a few 
hours, to revisit the earth. He was told that he would find all 
changed. 

No use ! 

He must go ! 

England, he found one workshop. Even the face of Nature 
was altered. Nothing as he left it ! France, Italy, Germany, 
failed to evoke any remembrance. All was changed. So, south- 
ward, like the swallows, to Spain ! 

As he felt the hot sun bite his cheek, and his eye swept over 
the fertile vegas of Murcia and Valencia; as he observed the 
uncultivated country, desolate and unpopulated, he exclaimed 
with rapture : " This, indeed, is the earth I knew. Under that 
olive tree could I sit me down and rest, and begin once more to 
name the animals, male and female, after their kind." 

A foreigner happened to relate the foregoing story in a ter- 
tulia or conversazione of Madrid. A distinguished Spaniard, who 
was present, remarked, and he expressed the opinion of all 
present : " Si, Sehor, y tenia razon, La Espafia es Paraiso." 
"Yes, Sir, and Adam was right, for Spain is Paradise." 

These two anecdotes, which are to be met with in almost any 
handbook of Spain, and which, if not true, might well be so, com- 
pletely synthetise her present position, and the view which every 
Spaniard, born and bred, is supposed to take, or ought to take, of 
his country. 



158 National Life and Thought. 

The modern influences of the nineteenth century have not worked 
much change on Spain. The railroad here assumes a certain 
listlessness, foreign to all idea of hurry and rush ; one can almost 
watch the grass as it grows between the rails ; we might still fall 
asleep and dream that Philip II. still reigns, and the Inquisition 
also, as we wander through the sombre mediaeval streets of the 
decayed cities of Castille. There is nothing to destroy the illu- 
sion, except the ugly clothes which we have donned as the world 
has grown uglier. 

Away from the narrow converging lines of railway (an admir- 
able lesson in perspective ; I wish for ever they had remained in 
prospective) there indeed the illusion grows so strong that it 
wants little of reality. 

Let us conjure up a traveller, and send him by sea to Spain. 
Let us follow him as he arrives fresh from the Northern greyness 
into the pellucid atmosphere of the South. Let us watch how 
his first impression of a new country, vivid as a flash of lightning, 
almost bewildering in its suddenness and strangeness, affects 
him. Let us suppose that it is night before the ship anchors in the 
smooth waters of a Spanish seaport. Let us take Vigo, for 
instance, with its incomparable bay and magnificent scenery. In 
the calm bosom of the gently heaving water, shut in on all sides 
by dark and mysterious shadows, are mirrored thousands of 
twinkling lights. They are the lights of the town in front of him, 
which climb up and cling to the dark mass of an eminence 
whose vague and rocky outlines he can feel rather than see. The 
feeble lights which twinkle redly from the houses alone illumine 
the mystery of an unknown town. The long quavering notes 
of the bugle, sounding the "Retirada," are. wafted over the 
water. In the early morning he hastes to seek the solution of 
the problem of the unknown. 

Against a broken mountainous background, which rises against 
a sky which every successive moment thrills with fresh pulses of 
colour, translucent, cold, and serene, like that we see framed by 
the dark shadow of a door or window in old German pictures ; 
the serried lines of houses which form the town glimmer whitely 
in that cold light which precedes sunrise. Hither and thither, 
above the irregular outlines of their roofs, rises the grey cupola 
of a bell tower, in which, even as he watches, the bells begin to 
move, and with grave and sombre sound wake the sleepers to life 
and prayer. 

He lands enthusiastic. He has only seen such scenes before 



Spain. 159 

painted by Hawes Craven, when he has been to see Irving at the 
Lyceum Theatre. An hour spent on the quay, in company with 
a sleeping cur, waiting for the Custom-house officer who never 
•comes, somewhat damps his enthusiasm. The lazy curiosity and 
remark, excited always in Spain by the appearance of a stranger, 
and especially if that stranger be a foreigner, of the loungers and 
unemployed boatmen (unemployed, you must understand, not so 
much for want of work as will) who lean over the railing at the 
landing-place, and while away the morning hours over a cigarette, 
irritate him. He resents the suspicious attitude of the green- 
gloved Carabiniers, who lean on their muskets, roll cigarettes, 
and watch him grimly. The sun begins to bite his unaccustomed 
•cheek shrewdly. He savagely meditates a letter to the Times on 
the barbarism of Spanish institutions and officials. He curses 
the hour that brought him to Spain ! A Spaniard, accustomed 
all his life to patience and longsuffering, to whom time is no 
object, and discomfort cannot exist, is calmly indifferent, offers 
his cigarettes freely to all around, and "takes the sun," which 
is gilding the world around him. But our Englishman fumes. 

At last he finds himself in what we will courteously allow to 
be an hotel (for such it calls itself), which is very little removed 
from the Arab caravanserai, or Fondak. Indeed, the word 
" Fonda" shows that its origin sprang from the East. His room 
has no curtains, no carpet, an iron bed and a straw chair are all 
the furniture. Depressed by the comfortless interior, he stands 
gazing vaguely out on to the sunlit patch of grass, which stretches 
in front of the hotel to the mole. He follows the movements of 
a horse feeding, the play of two yellow curs, a woman cutting 
grass with an antediluvian sickle. As she cuts, she intones one of 
those nasal, melancholy songs peculiar to this Scotland of Spain. 
He will find, too, that the sun has its melancholy, a calmer and 
serener melancholy than that of the long grey days of a northern 
climate, but a melancholy all the same. The senses seem to be 
steeped in an unknown sadness, a sadness which is reflected in 
the rich, fertile, beautiful, but most melancholy landscape of 
Galicia, in the wild undefinable burden of the song of the 
labourer, and the women washing at the stream. 

After breakfast, when he saunters up the hill into the town, he 
will find himself in the midst of an arcaded plaza or square. It 
is surrounded by great stern old granite palaces, which were the 
town houses of the powerful families who owned land in the 
vicinity of Vigo. Coats of arms project from their angles, and 



160 National Life and Thouglit. 

hang threateningly over the sombre gateways ; and yet, one of the 
contrasts of Spain, alongside of them, nay, in their very ground 
floors, little shops and booths, open to the street, flaunt their 
gaudy wares to entrap the innocent countryman. He passes 
before the prison, where murderers, smugglers, men and women 
are confined pell-mell. A basket dangles from the grated win- 
dow, tied to a cord of esparto grass, in which the relations 
deposit food ; the charitable, as they pass, a copper. The Spanish 
Government, no pamperer of men, contents itself with securing, 
not nourishing, the persons of its prisoners. Here rank is taken 
from the nature of the crime. The greatest ruffian smokes 
calmly at the window, the observed of all. The idlers step aside 
respectfully as his wife comes up, bearing tobacco and provisions. 
Her cry of " Gentlemen, my husband is the murderer ! " at once 
commands respect. 

What is it that he misses ? At first he does not analyse, but 
presently, like a flash of lightning, the thought strikes him, that 
there is no sound of wheels ! 

Let us go with him as he passes out of the brilliant sunshine of 
the plaza into the narrow, precipitous streets, full of cool shadows, 
where the sunlight is blotted out by the almost meeting eaves of 
the roofs on either side. 

The street is badly paved, uneven, tortuous. If any sound 
there is, it is of the echoing ring of a donkey's hoofs pattering 
over the cobble stones, the low murmur of voices from an open 
doorway. A closely veiled figure returning from early mass 
glides past him with prayer book and rosary. He almost 
stumbles over a little pig, which runs squeaking between his 
legs. 

The street brings us out on to the Alameda, the public garden, 
which looks down upon the sea, which lies spread out beneath it, 
an inland lake shut in by mountains, studded with the white sails 
of fisher-boats coming in from the open sea. It is hot ; the 
atmosphere balsamic with the scent of pine woods and the fresh 
salt smell of the sea. He begins to feel the soporific influences 
around him, a conquering laziness, an apathetic indifference. 
Care seems to have been left behind in duller climes. He 
stretches himself on a bench, twists a cigarette lazily, and com- 
placently watches a blind beggar sitting in the sun, a mass of 
rags, merry, and jesting with all who pass. Silent and dignified, 
he utters no words but, " Your grace, for the love of God ! " 
Curious, is it not, hardly to be conceived, that this being, so 



Spain. 161 

■deformed and hideous as to be terrible to look upon, maintains a 
certain dignity? Yet, is he not a Spaniard, a Christian — a 
gentleman? Give him of your copper largesse. He desires, 
courteously, that "your grace may go with God." If you refuse 
it, he will not implore curses on your head, but gravely regret 
that "your grace's heart is not open to the cry of poverty." His 
•condition implies no disgrace. It is his trade, just as another 
man happens to be a carpenter or blacksmith. 

The priest sweeps by in long black robes, which leave a trail 
on the dusty road. The black-gaitered " pareja," the pair of 
Guardia civiles ; the successors of the Hermandades of Isabella 
the Catholic, with muskets shouldered, their tricornes glittering in 
the sun, step briskly past into the country, to patrol the King's 
highways. 

It is night before our traveller returns to his hotel. His foot- 
step reverberates as he passes down the empty street, full of deep 
blotches of shadow. A narrow strip of starlit sky, alone, is 
visible between the spectral forms of the houses. Under a dark 
archway where an oil lamp flickers feebly before a blackened oil 
painting of our Lady of Grief, he is startled by the apparition of 
two dark-cloaked figures bearing pikes and lanterns. They are 
the serenes, the watchmen, the guardians of the peace of the 
sleeping town. They light him home to his hotel, and wield the 
iron knocker on the gates until the street resounds with answer- 
ing echoes. His mind reverts involuntarily to a sixteenth-century 
street in an English country town. Ah ! my friend ! never more 
in Messina (read Stratford-on-Avon) shall Dogberry and Verges 
sleep without offence at the church gates ! 

Oblivious of England and Spain alike in the mysterious country 
of sleep, the traveller's dream is broken by the cry of the watch- 
man (ever an old man and creaky), who in slow and guttural 
accent cries the midnight hour and the state of the night. 

And as days go by and the charm overpowers him, he remodels 
his manners, throws off his British prejudices and mauvaise honte 
.and reserve, learns to treat those who serve him, the same people 
that in England he would call the " lower classes," with a familiar 
courtesy, that the humblest Spaniard never imposes on. 

Not until he succeeds in doing this — not until his Anglo-Saxon 
blood assimilates some of the Gotho-Spanish ceremonial and 
formality of manner — does Senor Don Juan Bull, honest John 
Bull in England, become, as the Spaniards say, " an hombre muy 
formal," a man of weight and gravity — the quality ever prized 

L 



1 62 National Life and Thought. 

most highly by the Spaniard. Not until then does he receive the 
signs of goodwill and affection at the hands of the most un- 
affectedly good-natured and warm-hearted people on the face of 
the earth. 

Well, let us leave our stranger in Galicia, for my subject bears 
me away from it, although it gives me a pang to turn my back on 
the deep stony roads, water-courses in winter ; in summer 
shadowy and fragrant with aromatic essences of furze and pine, 
made musical with the slow creaking of ox carts ; — to leave its 
old grey battlemented houses, with their square "towers of hom- 
age," where the lords of the domain in days long gone by, swore 
fealty to the king, which gleam white against the shadowy forest 
of dark pines on the hillside. 

I am going to speak of Spain as she is, and always has been. 
With the Spain of opera comique I have nothing to do. Spain,, 
brown, arid, wind-swept, desolate; the Spain that centuries of war 
have made her ; of its people, quiet, dignified, oriental, self- 
possessed ; wrapped in brown cloaks, laborious yet indolent ; 
pitched within and without with that strange subtle melancholy, 
which separates them from all other nations. 

The Spain of French opera, the French illustrated papers have 
made familiar to the world. The sun, the fleas, the bull-fight, 
- the smuggler, the lean hidalgo, the fat peasant, the black eye 
peeping from a lace mantilla, the castahet, the gipsy dance, — are 
not all these depicted in chalky water-colours on the fan and tam- 
bourine, which you may buy for a few pence at Biarritz or 
Arcachon ? 

This Spain, if indeed it ever existed except on the aforesaid 
fan and tambourine, is but a reflection, a distorted tradition of 
the Calderonian drama, of that specifically styled of " cloak and 
sword," of the merry rascals of the Picaresque novels, of the 
corrupt society of the Bourbon kings. 

The sun, yes ! remains unchanged ; bull-fighters and gipsies are 
not quite extinct ; guitars still tinkle on the starry night ; thieves 
exist, but do more damage to the unwary traveller in the nice 
presentation of the hotel bill than with blunderbuss and slugs 
upon the highway ! 

No ! the Spainards are not a nation of fiddlers and dancers, 
nor yet of bull-fighters and smugglers. They do not live exclu- 
sively on cigarettes and garlic; their lives are not entirely 
devoted to dancing the seguidilla. 

These things, these types, have added their quota to the com- 



Spain. 163 

position of the national character; other and far different elements 
have made it what it is. 

An old English writer says, "A Frenchman on arriving at 
your house asks at once for food ; a Spaniard would rather die 
than do so." The witty Voltaire makes no man a hero to his 
valet. The ingenious Cervantes makes Sancho perceive that his 
master is a madman, but, whilst perceiving, still respect and love 
his noble nature. 

Neither am I going to laugh over the foibles and failings of the 
people I love. No ! I will leave that unenviable task to others. 
It is very amusing, very easy, to give a grotesque idea of the 
Spanish character by a little judicious exaggeration and elabora- 
tion. (Ford, and no stranger knew it better, erred a little on this 
side.) I, for my part, see more to respect, to love, to admire in 
the proud, self-respecting dignity, the simple sober habits, the 
native good manners and kindness, which are the characteristics 
of all classes of the nation. 

As I have said, modern ideas of progress (mind, I, for my part, 
neither call nor think it progress) have fleeted over the surface of 
Spain without taking root there. Foreign companies, Belgians 
and English, anxious to pocket her money, have made her rail- 
ways, and work her mines. The Spaniard, with his hands in his 
pocket, has stood by, indifferent that the rest of Europe was being 
propelled in carriages by steam ; the modes of travelling used by 
his forefathers were good enough for him. He has clung, and 
still clings, to his " coche de colleras," the old ramshackle, lum- 
bering, wooden coach, drawn by eight or sixteen mules, which 
everywhere else has become a dim tradition. In the remoter 
districts, inaccessible even by diligence, he travels on " caballeria." 
A "caballeria" may mean anything equine, from the meek 
donkey buried under the straw-stuffed " albarda," the saddle left 
by the Moors, and which you may see unaltered and exactly the 
same in Morocco at this day, to the small springy Castilian horse. 
With saddle-bags strapped on behind,- — the classical "alforjas" in 
which Sancho bore his brown bread and garlic when he followed 
his master in search of adventures of knight errantry, — and the 
" bota " or pig-skin bottle full of wine, and a rusty blunderbuss 
slung on in front (both equally potent as weapons in disarming ill- 
will, and the former especially a royal road to good fellowship), 
the Spaniard, muffled to the teeth, starts on his journey two or 
three hours before dawn, to get under shelter before the heat of 
the mid-day sun overtakes him ; the same scenes, the same 



1 64 National Life and Thought. 

people, congregate before the door of the wayside inn as before 
that at which Don Quixote arrived, at the end of his first journey 
over the ancient and well-known plain of Montiel. 

The traveller, before dismounting, calls loudly from the road 
for the lady hostess : " Peace be to this house ! " says he. " Is 
no one there ? " 

The hostess appears. The larder is well provided. There is 
of everything — rabbits, partridges, chickens, geese, goats' flesh, 
and pigs' feet ; but the rabbit is still to be caught, the partridge 
to be shot, and so on with the rest. They are, indeed, there, 
but making the most of a short existence in the courtyard within. 
At least there is provender for the animals — hay, chopped straw, 
and barley, and sour wine — what heart of man can be so un- 
reasonable as to wish for more on a journey ? 

Much of the travelling in Spain is still done on caballerias, 
donkey-back or mule-back, and may it be so for the rest of my 
life ! It is in these remote hamlets, in the long days spent on the 
by-ways of Spain with muleteers, ferrymen, at the " ventas " or 
■country inns, where the wants of man become subservient to those 
of the beast he bestrides ; where rough herdsmen, and shepherds 
from the mountains, congregate ; in the peasants' huts ; in the 
houses of the simple and credulous country priests, where in 
these remote districts it is often necessary to take shelter for the 
night and hospitality, that we find the national manners and 
customs unchanged since the Middle Ages, virtually unaltered to 
what they were when the Moors and the Spaniards lived side by 
side together in the heart of the Peninsula. 

Until 1830, it must be remembered that the high roads of Spain 
were all but impracticable. The road, for instance, from Madrid 
to Avila could only be traversed by mules or donkeys, dwindling 
into narrow paths, through rough wild pasture land, winding along 
the edges of steep precipices, or forming a narrow zigzag line 
along the slopes of mountains. The traveller, overtaken by a fall 
of snow or a fierce mountain storm on this wild exposed 
road, in the midst of unpeopled solitudes, where not even the 
shelter of a "venta" could be hoped for, went in danger of his 
life. 

The road from Avila to Talavera (I am confining myself to 
the roads of a particular district, which I have myself explored), 
traversing the lofty sierras between the provinces of Avila and 
Estremadura, was a thousand times worse. Difficult for carts, 
impossible for coaches, a Spaniard, before he travelled, made his 



Spain. 165 

will ; I believe he does so still. Not alone was there risk of 
falling in with " mala gente," robbers, smugglers, and others of 
the same caste, and of being robbed and murdered ; there was 
that not .only of coaches and strings of mules, but of the traveller 
on horseback getting stuck inextricably in the bogs, or of being 
drowned in the rivers, across which they were borne by " ford- 
ders " in the absence of bridges, that is, men who swam across 
bearing passengers, coach, and all, or the mounted equestrian, 
from one bank to the other. In the winter the journey must 
either be renounced altogether or an enormous circuit made to 
avoid the obstacles. 

We have touched briefly on the traveller. Let us see how the 
Spaniard fares at home. The outside of his house is grim and 
gloomy. The windows are protected by wrought-iron balconies 
and sombre gratings. Across the principal balcony is a branch 
of blessed palm, blessed by the priest on Easter Sunday, which 
drives away all spirits and influences of evil. His house, the 
great granite staircase, everything about it grand and vast and 
magnificent, would be a monument in any other country. You 
wish to enter ; you wield the heavy iron knocker until you wake 
hollow echoes in the great empty gateway and desolate staircase. 
An eye of an invisible person surveys you for a moment through 
the narrow grating. " Quien es ? " " Who is it ? " cries a voice. 
" Gente de paz," you answer, " People of peace." Or the salu- 
tation takes the form of an Ave Mary, and you answer gravely, 
" Conceived without sin." This is the indispensable ceremonial 
before entering a Spanish house. It takes one back to the 
comedies of Calderon, to the days of intrigue, rapiers, and 
gallants muffled to the eyes. It is a relic of more troublous 
times, when every man's house was his castle, in which he stood 
on his defensive. 

You enter, and traverse the vast stone passages, which lead to 
the great room of reception. You are led with state to the seat 
which stands at the head of the vast and empty room. It is the 
seat of honour, the " estrada," the dais of the Middle Ages. There 
are neither carpets nor curtains. A woven grass mat covers the 
brick or stone floor, which strikes cold to the feet. (I am speak- 
ing, be it remembered, of the Spaniard of the provinces, the 
Espanol rancio, of the Spaniard who clings to the ways and 
manners of his fathers. To whom to speak in Christian means 
to understand Castilian.) On the other hand, the window 
shutters, the doors, are heavily and quaintly carved and gilt. 



1 66 National Life and Thought. 

They are renaissance and works of art. But you notice that 
neither window nor door fulfil the office they were meant for. 
They shut badly, and neither exclude the sunlight nor the 
cold draughts of air. When the rooms are to be darkened the 
shutters are closed, and that is all. 

A few dusky oil-paintings hang on the whitewashed stone walls. 
A carved wooden image of a saint stands in its niche, and a holy- 
water "stoup" hangs by the door. You notice that there are 
no fireplaces. The huge chimneys before which his ancestors 
crouched on the winter nights before the blazing logs, have been 
done away with, bricked up to exclude the wind which rushed 
down them. Yes ; there is one in the dark, damp, dungeon-like 
kitchen, a slab raised about four feet from the ground, from 
which the thin smoke of a little charcoal fire meanders up the 
vast bell-shaped Moorish chimney. Roasting, therefore, is an art 
unknown in the Spanish cuisine. The earthenware pipkins which 
stand on tripods over the smouldering charcoal contain his 
favourite and frugal dishes; his "puchero;" his " estofado," his 
stew ; his bread crumbs fried in oil ; his chocolate. 

In such a house it is needless to look for mechanical or snug 
bourgeois comfort. The Spaniard's house reveals his Eastern 
origin. To a race half African, half Hebrew, wholly Eastern, a 
house serves rather to bivouac than to live in, and contradicts 
every modern notion of life. A true Castilian knows and needs 
no other fire but the genial glow of the sun — the sun which is his 
God. Whatever the agony he suffers as he crouches in his vast, 
bare, cold house over the ashes of a brazier, wrapped in his cloak, 
he forgets it all if he can but "take the sun." He takes it as we 
take food or medicine, or something necessary to our existence. 
" Cuando Dios amanece," when God rises, is his usual expression 
for daybreak. Like the Arab or the Moor, his life is spent in the 
field or the street. In his house, indeed, he eats and sleeps, but 
it is in the street that he lives; in the street that he meets his 
friends, transacts his business. The street oftener than not is 
his counting house. 

What about his women? He leaves them shut up in the 
gloomy house he flees from in a seclusion as complete as that of 
a Moorish harem or a Christian convent. On high festivals and 
Sundays alone they may be seen abroad in the public walks and 
streets ; the mother swathed like an Arab in folds of thin black 
cashmere, which very often covers a religious habit, a dignified, 
sad-faced figure, which impresses us sadly with the vague idea it 



Spain. 167 

implies of resignation, self-sacrifice, and female nullity. The 
daughters wear the classical mantilla. 

Let us follow him to the country, where his antique methods of 
agriculture transport us back to the idyllic days of Theocritus. 
The plough made of two forked sticks drawn by a donkey or an 
■ox — the same as that depicted in the Egyptian hieroglyphics 
—exactly what we may see to-day, as we wander through the 
British Museum, painted on the sides of a mummy case. His 
whole country life he has inherited from the Moors ; the terms he 
uses for his rural implements, his trees, his plants, are purely 
Moorish ; so are the names of his weights and measures for corn 
and wine and oil. His garden is the Moorish huerta, a place of 
shade and running water, fragrant with the scent of orange flowers 
or fruit; where vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers, corn, maize, 
and grass are alike cultivated. A few clumps of trailing odori- 
ferous flowers, and sweet-smelling shrubs, roses and red sage, 
sweet basil, violets, the tall spikes of lillies, — alone serve to 
connect it with the conventional idea of a flow r er garden. The 
shallow channels which intersect the whole of the ground in 
every direction, in the morning and evening flushed with water, 
become rivulets, whose crystalline murmur soothes the ear with a 
refreshing sense of rest. This method of irrigation, the best in 
the world, was also introduced by the Moors. The Spaniard's 
country house is patriarchally simple, a long, low, rambling, sunlit 
grange. If he is an hidalgo, there is the grey "tower of homage," 
and on the great stone stair which leads to the living rooms a 
heavy slab covers the well, which, in times long gone by, was left 
open at night, so that thieves and untoward visitors, coming up 
the stairs, might fall into its depths. The interior, old, falling to 
pieces, never repaired, spotlessly clean, smells of lavender and 
rusticity. A heap of maize in the corner of the sitting-room, a 
greyhound asleep in the sunlit gallery, an old gun and game-bags, 
testify to the rural occupations of its owner. 

Through the chinks of the floor rises up the strange, penetrat- 
ing odour, not unpleasant, of the cattle and horses stabled 
beneath, and which you can hear as they slowly ruminate, or pull 
at the chains of their halters ; the scent of the breath of oxen, the 
sweet smell of dried grass and clover. 

My time will not allow me to do more than touch on the quaint 
and original aspect of a Spanish town ; on its arcaded market 
places, round which are deep and sombre warehouses, their low- 
browed gateways forming deep blotches of shadow within the 



1 68 National Life and Thought. 

arches, once, in Charles V.'s and Philip II. 's lime, filled with bales, 
of merchandise. Botas, pig-skins full of wine, lie piled before 
some of them ; the public weights hang up in the most conspicu- 
ous corner for the use of all comers ; little booths fill up the 
spaces between the arches, where country men and vendors, 
bargain and chatter. 

Nor must I forget the ragged donkeys, that intimate part of 
the life of Castilian man, groups of them patiently nodding in 
the centre of the market-place, waiting for their masters, or laden 
with red earthenware jars, the fashion of which involuntarily 
takes us back to the East, whence they originated ; nor the 
market-place itself, paved with pebbles, uneven as the waves of 
the sea, where the sun sleeps, and long trains of mules stand 
motionless in the heat ; filled with a busy, merry, vociferous crowd,, 
engaged on nothing ; the strident voices of market women ; the 
strange wild strain chanted in guttural accents by a muleteer ; the 
pilgrim bound to Santiago, who shoves his way through the 
throng, bearing the classic staff and gourd, with cockleshell sewed 
on his breast, and begs for a copper to lighten his journey. 

You will find such things, such contrasts, nowhere else in 
modern Europe, and this, to my mind, constitutes the intimate 
charm of Spain; her inability to absorb the thoughts and habits of 
any other nation, her want of receptivity of all modern influences, 
the difficulty of reducing her to the ordinary insipidity and tame- 
ness which makes all modern life the same, be it Berlin or 
Bucharest. 

Let us stop to inquire a moment into the causes which make 
the Spanish nation so obtuse to all modern influences. The first 
arises from the most prominent attribute of the Spanish national 
character — its entirety. A Spaniard prides himself on being 
" muy entero " (very entire), which means that he sticks doggedly 
to opinions once formed. Well, the Spaniards formed their 
opinions in the reign of Philip II., and have stuck to them ever 
since. 

Let me illustrate this trait of the Spanish character by a historic 
fact, which I will try to make as little dull as possible. 

The vulgar idea of Spain is that she was a country which hung 
breathlessly on the decrees of Rome. Not so. We shall find that 
Ferdinand and Isabella, pre-eminently the Catholic Kings — such 
the title awarded to them by the Pope of the day — neither under- 
stood nor brooked the exercise of Papal authority within their 
dominions. The Pope might be Prince of Rome, but they were 



Spain. i6g 

Kings of Spain. They reserved to themselves the right of nomi- 
nation to all ecclesiastical dignities ; the Pope's bulls were sub- 
mitted to a rigorous examination by the Supreme Council of the 
State before they were allowed to be circulated, and were sup- 
pressed at pleasure, if thought well to do so. The grim Sphinx 
of the Escorial — the tetrical, strange, weird Philip II., still a 
riddle to historians unable to solve whether he was saint or devil 
— inherited from his father, Charles V., and carried on to the full 
the traditions of his grandfathers. The Pontifical decrees were 
still placed under the strictest and most rigorous examination as 
to whether they contained anything contrary to the prerogatives 
of king and kingdom, and if so, their circulation was suspended 
until appeal was made to the Pope either to withdraw or modify 
them or to dictate fresh ones. 

And here comes in the Spanish character. The retention was 
qualified under the form of a suspension, and an appeal from the 
Pope misguided to the Pope better informed — from "Philip 
drunk to Philip sober." This humble and submissive form was 
but a hypocritical manoeuvre. If another decree to the same 
purpose arrived from Rome, it was again withdrawn under the 
supposition that the Pope continued in his ignorance. If the 
Pope excommunicated the authors of this obstinate conduct, his 
anathema was invalidated and worthless. A third order to the 
same effect as before would have revealed, according to Spanish 
ideas, a tenacity against all propriety and order, and, viewed in 
this light, inconceivable; and so the Spanish juris-consults 
declared this proceeding (indeed unheard of) as contumacious. 

There is a second cause to which we owe the survival of the 
genuine, distinct, and most curious national life of Spain. 

And that is in the Inquisition. The very name makes one 
shudder ! But, putting religious prejudices aside (for the religious 
history of Protestantism and Catholicism can only be written with 
impartiality in the century to come, and we shall never live to see 
it), the cold machinery of the Inquisition, which mangled men's 
bodies and put fetters on their minds, was in its worst days as 
much, nay, more a political than a religious instrument. She 
gave religious unity, and, under the wing of that unity, perpetuated 
the national life of Spain. Sects, Sectarians, Anabaptists, Shakers, 
Quakers, Anglican clergymen — broad, high, and evangelical — have 
never reigned rampant over Spain. The loud-voiced freethinker 
of the towns still sneaks furtively to mass as if about to commit a 
felony. The churches are thronged on the solemn feast days ; 



570 National Life and Thought. 

here in the great and shadowy cathedral, inarticulate with awe, 
the rude herdsman contemplates the famous Christ, which his 
father, his grandfather, and their forefathers, back to the time of 
the Catholic kings, have venerated also. 

And now I must briefly touch on the peasantry, the secret of 
Spain's greatness in the past — perhaps, who knows, of her great- 
ness in the future. No other like it exists in Europe for its 
freedom, independence, endurance, and native nobility. Hallam, 
who has noticed it, as have all who have written of Spain, suggests 
that because, unlike England or the other European countries of 
the Middle Ages, villainage was never known in Castille. All its 
men were soldiers ; each man who bore arms against the Moors 
was ennobled, — ennobled not only by the use of arms, but the 
grand ideal he had before him of fighting for his country's freedom. 
Whole provinces of Spain are still ennobled. In Castille every 
man is an hidalgo, and looks it, down to the roughest, uncouthest 
savage herding sheep in the pasture land which surrounds some 
country hamlet, whose stalwart bearing is full of resolution, fear- 
lessness, robust and self-respecting dignity. The essentially 
democratic spirit of the nation which these causes fostered was 
never more conspicuous than during the dark days of the Inquisi- 
tion and Philip II. The nobles had little weight or influence 
in the National Councils. Spain swarmed with gentlemen and 
adventurers — between whom the line was not always easy to draw, — 
it was hard to find where the gentleman ended and the adventurer 
began. There was neither great wealth nor poverty ; of poor 
gentlemen no end. To-day this principle is the pervading and 
remarkable characteristic of Spanish society, where a Duchess 
thinks it no lessening of her dignity to shake hands with the shop- 
man who sells her ribands, and to chat with him as he smokes a 
cigarette behind the counter. 

Whether such a democratic feeling is the cause or effect of the 
greater racial refinement of the Spaniard, which is especially con- 
spicuous in the peasantry; whether climate, the happy influences 
of sun and light and warmth, under which the carking cares of 
life can never weigh so heavily, have developed a superior mental 
and physical susceptibility of the Latin and southern races to all 
refining influences ; or whether it is the greater leisure given to 
body and mind by the greater opportunities for enjoyment 
afforded by the great number of feast days and Church holidays, 
which constitute a good half of the year ; or whether it arises 
from the superior aesthetic influences, brought to bear upon him 



Spain. lyi 

from his earliest youth, in the splendid ceremonies — the worship 
full of ceremonial and symbol of his Church; the great and 
solemn processions wending through dim and shadowy aisles of 
vast cathedrals ; the plain song, sombre and grave, which echoes 
through the rafters of the .roof; the sweet perfumes which arise 
from swinging censers, like a cloud of vapour ; the flush of sensu- 
ous colour, light, and sound ; the organ which interprets to earthly 
•ears the Te Deums of angelic choirs ; the images, pathetic, sad, 
benignant, bland, and merciful, the advocates of his humble 
prayers, — I will not attempt to decide. 

Certainly, in Spain the peasantry cannot be called the lower 
classes. We might seek in vain for anything dimly approaching 
the degradation, the drunkenness, the inhuman horror, the 
debased and squalid humanity, which form the bulk of the popula- 
tion of London, Glasgow, and the industrial towns of England. 
The Spanish peasant or artisan — the artisan is here called an 
artist, a master, as in the Trades Guilds of the Middle Ages — 
rarely drmks ; he loves fine clothes and clean shirts ; he cultivates 
a pretty taste for gambling, whether in the State Lottery or at 
cards. His amusements are of a nature which we find in Eng- 
land almost exclusively confined to what convention calls the 
"better classes." To see the people in those happy moments 
when they escape from workshop or field; as they twang the 
guitar, and dance before the wine-shop door in some country 
hamlet ; or wend their way on some " romeria " or merry pilgrim- 
age to a local shrine, following the custom of remote generations 
of their fathers, is a picture in which the artist may find infinite 
grace, infinite colour, infinite beauty ! (Happy if he can render it !) 

Political economists have decried the feast days and holidays 
— they have gone so far as to attribute to them the decadence of 
Spain. Even old Feyjoo, the wise old Galician Benedictine 
monk, who from his cell in the monastery of his order at Oviedo 
(which it has been reserved for a succeeding generation to turn 
into a public office, where a lying official cheats people and 
Government alike) wrote those w T onderful treatises on the errors 
and prejudices of his age, incurring thereby obloquy and fame, 
alike the immediate reward of those great minds which go before 
.and pave the road of progress ; who spoke of the position and 
education of women, in a way that I doubt whether any Spaniard 
•of the middle or upper classes would assent to now (oh ! the 
mental ignorance of your bourgeois and foolish noble) ; — even he 
professed to find in the frequent romerias and number of feast 



172 National Life and Thought. 

days an influence for evil, whilst we, of the nineteenth century, are 
convinced that every man who labours has as much right and, a 
fortiori, a stronger right than he who does not, to that leisure in 
which the hard wrought fibres of the body and mind may have 
the strain slackened. 

I should like to say a few words about the modern literature of 
Spain, as it has taken a most important and original development, 
and is destined to take a high place amongst the national litera- 
tures of the nineteenth century. Perhaps no country can boast of 
such a brilliant group of writers — true, I can count them on my 
fingers, they are as the Spaniards say, " pocos y buenos," few and 
good. Above them all shines fantastic, impalpable, like a will-o'- 
the-wisp or a gleam of pale moonlight on the sward, the strange 
furtive genius of Becquer, who in his weird fantastic legends and 
subtle verse seems to have inherited and transmitted to us the 
very spirit which produced the mysticism of the Middle Ages, and 
inspired a San Juan de la Cruz. He died at thirty of a broken 
heart. 

Perez Galdos, the melancholy and reserved Canary Islander, is 
the realistic student of modern Spanish society ; of those violent 
contrasts caused by the struggle between the old national life of 
Spain and the disturbing influences of modern and ultramon- 
tane thought and life. 

If you would conceive some idea of modern Spain, Spain as 
she is in this fleeting moment, you will find it portrayed to the 
life by an artist, whose brush omits no detail however insignifi- 
cant, dissected by the scalpel of a skilful anatomist in "Gloria;" 
" Leon Roch ; " " El Amigo ; " " Manso ; " " el Doctor Centeno ; " 
" Tormento," etc. The nature and historic reality of the Epis- 
odois Nacionales have already made them integral parts of the 
national literature of Spain, in which the dramatic events which 
constitute the history of Spain from the conclusion of the last 
century are knit together in a series of fictions, in which already 
the eye of the treasure-seeker might have predicted the coming 
glory of the Leon Roch. In the characters which live in the 
pages of this monumental fiction, we shall find the same delicate 
portrayal of character, the vivid light and shade, the dramatic and 
real interest, which have since made their author famous. 

Pereda, a native of Santander, has dedicated himself to 
describing with a master hand the customs, aspects, the lives full 
of hardship and picturesqueness, of the laborious mountaineers, 
and rough fishermen of his native province. 



Spain. 173 

Firmly every touch is laid on the canvas until some little village, 
nestling in the slopes of a hill, covered with chestnut woods, or 
buried in the shade of the valley beside some brawling trout- 
stream ; and the lives, secrets, and thoughts of its inhabitants, 
woven into a humble drama, lie exposed to our view. Galdos 
paints an ephemeral phase of society, the elements of which, 
even as he paints, are dissolving; which will within twenty, at the 
most forty years, be antiquated — as antiquated as that depicted 
by Balzac. Will he live ? Is there in his books that quality, that 
reality, which for its innate truth will defy time and public opinion 
to lessen and conquer immortality? We cannot tell. That 
Perida will live — will live under the shadow of Cervantes, as 
being next to him one of the greatest of European novelists — is, 
I think, indubitable. He has described a state of rustic society 
and manners historically true — a state of manners unimpaired for 
ages. He deals with realities, not with psychological problems ; 
he sees more beauty in the rural tasks, in a country feast with its 
vivid life and colour, than in the mental aberrations of a weak- 
kneed and unstrung social life in Madrid. The one deals with 
man face to face with, and acted upon by, a Nature eternally the 
same — a patriarchal simplicity of life as true to-day in the moun- 
tains of the Asturias as in the pastoral days of ancient Greece ; 
the other with the human character disturbed by the conflicting 
influences of a temporary moment of an artificial social life, its 
harmony and balance destroyed or greatly impaired. As we read 
"El Sabor de la Tierruca," "Pedro Sanchez," " Sotileza," we 
hear the lowing of cattle, the slow tinkling of the bell as they are 
driven slowly home through the dusky village streets ; we watch 
the autumn advance stealthily and sadly ; we see the naked trees 
streaming with dew or rain ; the flocks of sea-birds, driven inland 
from the coast by the cold and storm, settling on the stubble 
fields amongst the dried stalks of maize. We see the peasants 
crouch around the blaze as the hailstones rattle against the walls, 
the cattle ruminating despondently, dripping with wet, in the 
" corral ; " we hear the slow, melancholy wind of autumn, which, 
increasing in fury, tears the tiles off the humble roofs, whirls the 
dried leaves from the chestnut trees, and brings down the old 
decayed bell-tower of the village church. We follow fascinated 
the incidents which chequer the lives of the humble dramatis 
persona; the guileless character of the simple-minded village 
priest, whose peasant shrewdness is still keen enough to see 
through the wiles of his parishioners; the greed of the rich 



174 National Life and TJwugJit. 

labourer who lends out money and sucks his poorer neighbours' 
into terrible toils from which there is no escape ; the poor, proud, 
and simple-minded hidalgo, whose grey escutcheons, which 
moulder over the gateway of his old dilapidated house, do not 
drive hunger from the door; the superstitions, — innocent, often 
terrible, of the villagers, — all these live and breathe in pages 
which bear the very reality of truth and the love of an enthu- 
siast. 

We may also count Valera, the ambassador and scholar, the 
dainty literary dilettante, amongst the pre-eminently great novelists 
of Spain. Pepita Jimenez for artistic form, and absolute har- 
mony between the idea and form which clothe it, would be a gem 
in any language. 

Leopoldo Alas towers in criticism. In a style simple, terse, 
so unaffectedly natural, that we can say of it as Fraz Luis de 
Leon did of Sta. Teresa's, that it is elegance itself, la misma ele- 
gancia ; he gives vent to a mordant satire which bites like acid, 
or a delicate and subtle humour which is fascinating and delight- 
ful. He is terribly truthful, terribly in earnest, and he uses his 
weapons mercilessly. Such a critic must exercise an almost 
incalculable influence for good on the formation and heightening 
of the standard of a current literature. No one in Spain at this 
moment writes a Spanish so free from mannerism and bombast. 
From this point of view, the slightest fragment he has ever 
written is invaluable. He has written a great novel, a novel so 
powerful that it places him in the foremost rank of modern 
novelists. We might compare it, had it been shorter and more 
concentrated, with the greatest work that mediaeval Spanish 
realism produced, the great tragi-comedy of " The Celestina." 

One critic leads me to another. Any account, however brief, 
of modern Spanish literature would be incomplete if it did not 
include the name of Menendezy Pelayo. He has written a work 
on the Progress of Esthetic Thought in Spain from the Earliest 
Times, in which he shows how and to what degree it has been 
influenced by the ideas imported from foreign sources. Besides 
the German and French, he traverses an immense cycle of Eng- 
lish literature ; the Scotch School of Philosophy, Reid, Stewart, 
etc. ; Cowper, Pope, Dryden, Carlyle, Ruskin, which he criticises 
with a precision and appreciation that only a long and continuous 
study of English literature could ensure. This book, full of 
erudition and research, of earnest and careful thought, of keen 
acute criticism, would, if it had been written in English or Ger- 



Spain. 175; 

man instead of Spanish, at this moment have been translated 
into every other European language as a great and monumental 
work. He has set himself the task of vindicating and resusci- 
tating the literary and scientific glory of Spain in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, a period in which all foreign critics have 
affected to find a singular dearth of philosophical and original 
thought. He has gone far to prove that in spite of the trammels 
cast on thought by the Inquisition, Spain could boast in those 
centuries of schools and teachers of Philosophy as original, as 
great, and as glorious as any other country of Europe ; that in 
their works may be found the germ of those great ideas, of those 
revulsions of thought, which it was reserved to other nations to 
develop. He has vindicated the glory of Gomez Pereira, a Car- 
tesian before Descartes ; of Valle's, the terrible adversary of the 
Aristotelian Cosmology ; of Huarte, the father of Phrenology ; 
of Servet, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood; of 
Fernan Perez de Oliva, who spent his life in experiments as to 
how two people, separated by distance, could be made to com- 
municate with each other by the means of the magnet; of Luis 
Vives, who advocated that method, afterwards indelibly connected 
with the name of Bacon. And a woman must not forget to 
mention the greatest female writer in Spain, perhaps in Europe — 
there is no writer of her sex that I could name in England to 
approach her — Emilia Pardo Bazan, whose article on the " Position 
of Spanish Women " lately attracted so much attention in the 
pages of the Fortnightly Review. Her literary life has been 
crowded with work. From the study of the legends, philosophy, 
and historic movement of the Middle Ages, which she gives us 
in her life of San Francisco de Asis, to a pamphlet on the question 
which for a time convulsed all literary Spain, viz., Realism and 
Idealism in Art, Zola versus Victor Hugo, she has explored 
the most diverse fields of literature with brilliant success. She 
has lectured on Nihilism, a movement which she considers full 
of vitality and vigour, for the very good reason, as she told me, 
that she knew nothing whatever about Russia, and therefore was 
the better able to form an impartial opinion. She has written 
much, but, undoubtedly, what she has given us of most artistic 
value are one or two novels, Los Pazos de Ulloa, and Mother 
Nature, La Madre Naturaleza. These two books alone place 
her far beyond any writer of her sex I know of in England. In 
them she describes, with loving truth and unerring exactitude, the 
scenery and primitive manners of the province where she was 



176 National Life and Thought. 

born and has lived the greater part of her life — Galicia. They 
are full of dramatic and sustained interest, of life and colour. 

Amongst a number of novels and other works, let me signalise 
a volume of charming essays on her native province, Mi Tierra, 
and another of short stories, La Dama Joven, in which I can 
trace a faint perfume of Bret Harte, and which will, perhaps, take 
as high, or a higher place, when the history of the present literature 
of Spain comes to be written, than even the more sustained novels 
I have mentioned. 

It is to her, possibly (I hope so), that Spain may owe the 
higher education of its women. Clever, witty, full of initiative, 
belonging by birth to one of the noblest families of Galicia, she 
has already done more towards that object than could reasonably 
have been expected from that alternately idolised, alternately 
despised, long-suffering and very patient creature, they call a 
woman. 

Amongst dramatists and poets, Spain can number names like 
Zorrilla, Campoamor, Ayala, Echegaray, who, besides being a 
powerful dramatist, is a scientist of note. N 

Secondary names throng to my mind ; but those I have quoted, 
for original genius can compare with advantage to themselves 
with the exponents of the current literature of any other country 
in Europe. 

An indescribable pathos and melancholy hangs around modern 
Spain which cannot fail to impress a thoughtful mind. In the 
midst of its beautiful and harmonious decay, a happy but poor 
people, an industrious peasantry, might have lived unenvied, 
unenvying. 

But she has felt the restless and accursed influence of the 
great industrial revolution, or rather evolution, which has trans- 
formed the bulk of the people of Europe into work slaves and 
manufacturers of fortunes ; the fungus growth of a few years, a 
middle-class, ostentatious and vulgar, is increasing in Madrid, 
Barcelona, and the trading towns; a cheap veneer of modern 
bourgeoisism is spreading, utterly alien to the national life and 
instincts, which it modifies but cannot alter; — this, combined 
with other causes, the altogether disproportionate taxation of the 
peasantry, squeezed to the limits of possibility to gratify the greed 
of the needy politicians, who swarm like locusts in Madrid ; a 
Government, whose sole object seems to be to extort the last 
pound of flesh from the agriculturist, for the sole object, as it 
appears to me, of maintaining a large and useless standing army ; 



Spain. 177 

— these are the vampires which suck the blood from the children 
of the soil. 

A Spaniard never tires of declaiming against the universal cor- 
ruption which extends down to the very lowest branches of the 
administration, but never seeks to remedy it — Cosas de Espana. 

The soldier swarms. True, he no longer sits fishing with a 
piece of string tied to his bayonet at the seaport town. No 
longer on guard in the dilapidated castle, does he sleep under the 
shade of his coat, stuck upon his musket, through the supposed 
hours of his vigilance. No longer, when you pass him, does his 
brown hand steal out from a tattered greatcoat, and silently 
implore your charity. Seldom, to-day, shall you see him asleep 
guarding stalwart prisoners, who in the public square with cut- 
lasses fell the grass as it were trees. He has a uniform — 
boots too, which he replaces with sandals when on the march 
— but his pay remains of the slenderest, and his rations of the 
scantiest. 

The Artillery, corresponding to the Household Troops in 
England, are the flower of the Spanish Army ; the Cavalry, of 
small account, well horsed but badly drilled, equipped, and de- 
signed apparently for no other purpose but to squander public 
money ; the Infantry, patient of hardship to an incredible extent, 
still preserves the tradition of untiringness on the march, which 
was its characteristic in the Middle Ages. The officers, ill-paid 
and ignorant in the lower grades, become ambitious, and remain 
ignorant, when they attain the rank of Colonel. Their first idea, 
to advance themselves by political scheming ; their amusements, 
the bull fight, the card table, and intrigues with the women of the 
town where they are quartered. Both soldier and officer, one of the 
plague spots of the country ; one of the causes, together with the 
others I have mentioned, of the increasing emigration to the 
River Plata and Chile, which has taken alarming proportions of 
the backbone of the country, and without which it must dwindle 
into absolute ruin — the peasantry. 

A large Spanish proprietor said to me the other day, " I don't 
know what we are all to do in the face of this increasing emigra- 
tion. We cannot cultivate our lands ourselves, and all the 
labourers are going. We shall find ourselves face to face with 
ruin." I have passed lately through villages in the north of 
Spain, where on every door was painted a rude red cross, the sign 
of abandonment and departure. When I listened for the accus- 
tomed and well-remembered song of the peasant, as he dug 

M 



178 National Life and Thought. 

between his vines, the silence was pathetically significant. The 
men have all left a country which has proved such a bitter 
mother, and only women and children are left. 

It is strangely sad and oppressive to see, as in Spain, a grand 
ideal, which has inspired centuries of thought, and art, and life, 
lying vanquished, buried, crushed, annihilated under the material 
ruins of its grandeur. 

The coldness and neglect which brood over the Church of San 
Marcos of Leon, the celebrated monastery and hospital of the 
wealthy Knights of Santiago, which contains the cell where 
Quevedo was confined, one of the most magnificent monuments 
of early Renaissance that Spain possesses, penetrate to our very 
marrow. The monastery has become a museum of bad antiqui- 
ties. The ragged urchins of the doorkeeper play about amongst 
the grand old carved stalls of the " Coro Alto " (the raised choir). 
The organ is silent. Had it been moveable, it would long ago 
have been sold. The immense chests in the sacristy, of a work- 
manship the art of which seems entirely lost, which contained 
the splendid vestments of gold tissue and brocade, stand empty, 
until such time as the porter shall break them up and burn them 
for firewood. On the promulgation of the decree for the suppres- 
sion of the monasteries, the two hundred Esculapian friars, who 
preserved the building and loved it, were turned out in a single 
night ; the altar, stripped and torn to pieces, testifies to their pre- 
cipitate flight. 

As with the convents, so with the people. The Maragatos, 
that strange and singular race, which cluster in gipsy-like com- 
munities amongst the red sandhills of Astorga, the traditional 
carriers of Spain, their long files of carts, and strings of laden 
mules, the strangest, wildest, most picturesque sight the country 
roads of Spain can present ; their origin and that of their curious 
costume and marriage ceremonies lost in the night of antiquity 
— some say they are descended from the Goths, others from the 
Moors — are passing away. To-morrow they will have vanished. 
The railroads make such a race of men superfluous, and you will 
alone be able to trace the fact of their existence in the legends 
which linger in the country side ; in researches amongst historical 
antiquities ; in the dust and confusion of public libraries. 

It would be curious to speculate what would have been the 
fate of Spain to-day if the idea of political and religious liberty 
had not waved its tempting lure before the eyes of its Catholic 
Kings. Had their temper, and the temper of the people they 



Spain. 179 

governed (for the stimulus came from the heart of the nation), 
been more tolerant and less exclusive, Spain and her colonies 
would probably have been preponderant in the world. Instead 
of the God-like English-speaking man of Mr. Stead, we might 
have had to reckon with the Spaniard. Her agricultural capa- 
bilities would have been exploited by the Moors ; the Jews 
would have taken charge of her commercial interests; — all this 
presupposing a tolerance of thought which would have placed 
Spain in the foremost rank of the kingdoms of Europe. It is 
not rash to affirm that to-day she would have been one of the 
biggest industrial countries in the world; millions of factory 
chimneys would have been vomiting foul smoke, blackening the 
radiant sky, which covers the great melancholy plains of Castille 
or the wild pasture grounds of Andalusia. Her cities, so beauti- 
ful in their decay, would not exist ; her agricultural life which 
in its primitive simplicity takes us back to the idyllic days of 
Theocritus, would have disappeared (as it has in England), and 
her legends might have become forgotten. 

Let me point out that we are too apt to overlook the import- 
ance of these retrogade, stagnated, decayed countries (call them 
what you will) ; we forget that they are our only visible material 
connection with the past ; that in them only can we study the 
past ; they have not, like England, Germany, France, indissolubly 
severed their intimate connection with it. Not but that what the 
handbook (I seem to be fond of handbooks) calls " monuments of 
art " do not exist in the countries I have mentioned, but they are 
monuments only, and the link between them and the national 
thought and life is eternally broken. Looked on with a sort of 
patronising pity by some — "poor old things, how long they last !" 
— with genuine admiration by the many, with wistful sadness by 
the few, still they are emphatically skeletons of the dry bones of 
things and ideas which have been, but now are not. 

Let us remember that these countries, which have stopped 
short and crystallised, as it were, at a certain point of their career, 
are of far more importance than any country devoted to industry 
can be, in the development and continuance of the most import- 
ant introspective faculties of man. Let us remember that how- 
ever much they may seem, to a superficial criticism, merely 
melancholy and beautiful museums of antiquities, that the life of 
other ages is still warm in them, and that they have played a far 
more important part in the history of human culture than any 
state of society possible now. 



180 National Life and Thought. 

They open to us other horizons lying behind us ; horizons 
which every year in the world's history makes a little dimmer ; 
horizons in which the mind, weary with railways, surfeited with 
the ugliness and brutality of material progress and its concomitant 
miseries, may seek and find rest, refreshment, light ! 



X. 

NOR WA Y. 

H. L. BRACKSTAD. 

I WOULD ask you to go back with me about a thousand years, 
and to picture to yourself a bright, sunny morning on the 
eastern coast of England in those early times. The ancient 
Saxons are just bestirring themselves to begin their day's work 
— men, women, and children are issuing from their primitive 
huts ; they stretch themselves, rub their eyes, and gaze towards 
the glittering sea, upon which the rising sun is shining in all its 
glory. Suddenly an old man discovers a speck on the horizon ; 
his experienced eye tells him that it is something unusual ; he 
mounts the nearest eminence; soon he sees a large vessel — a 
stranger from over the sea — steering towards the coast. The 
old Saxon runs to tell his neighbours, and before long people are 
seen hurrying to and fro ; the men are talking loudly, the women 
wail, the children shriek. " It is the Norsemen ! Save us from 
the Norsemen ! — save us from the Norsemen ! " is the cry that 
rends the air. 

You know what followed. These strangers, these .Vikings, 
introduced themselves in a most rude and unceremonious way 
to your ancestors, the early Saxons — unceremonious, I say, for 
not only did they pay you these visits uninvited, but they also 
helped themselves to everything they took a fancy to, without 
asking anybody's leave to do so — goods and chattels, gold and 
silver, sheep and oxen — yea, even your fair-haired Saxon maids 
did they take unto themselves; and after making merry, and feast- 
ing on your good English ale, they set sail for their own fjords and 
creeks, only to return again next spring to the shores of Albion to 
fill their galleys again with all the good things they could find, till 
at last these unwelcome visitors became a source of terror and 
dread along the whole coast. 

This was the way, I believe, in which the old Norsemen and 
the English first became acquainted with each other — a very 
barbarous one, I must acknowledge ; but, notwithstanding this, 
I find that, in time, the relations between the two countries 



1 82 National Life and Thought. 

became more and more friendly — some of the Norwegian princes 
were even sent over to England to be brought up ; and now, I 
am glad to say that all feeling of animosity has vanished ; in 
fact, I find that some of your first English families rather pride 
themselves upon being descendants of these Vikings, or the 
Normans, who were descendants of Norwegian Vikings that 
settled in the north of France, and after whom that part of the 
country was called Normandy. Within the last few weeks a well- 
known writer, Mr. Du Chaillu, has published a voluminous work, 
"The Viking Age," in which he attempts to prove that the whole 
of the English people are descendants of the Scandinavians — that 
is, the Norwegians, . Danes, and Swedes, and not of the Anglo- 
Saxons, are the real ancestors of the English race. I expect this 
theory has come somewhat suddenly upon the English, and it 
will, no doubt, take some time before it will be fully gone into 
and refuted. Several reviewers have, however, already protested 
against Mr. Du Chaillu's theory. I may here mention that the 
other day a clergyman in the north of England actually wept on 
reading Mr. Du Chaillu's arguments — not from joy, however, but 
from sheer vexation — on learning that he descended from such 
barbarians as the old Vikings. It is, however, well known that 
large numbers of Norwegians settled in the Orkney and Shetland 
Islands, on the eastern coast of Scotland and England, especially 
in Yorkshire, and even in Ireland ; but I am fully convinced that 
these northern invaders are not the original ancestors of the 
English. There must have been, and, as a matter of fact, there 
was, a race — the old Anglo-Saxons, or Britons, if you choose to call 
them so — that had been settled, no doubt for centuries, in this 
country before the Norwegians and Danes first began to visit 
these shores. 

Norway and her people ought, therefore, to be of special interest 
to Englishmen, not only on account of the blood-relationship 
between the two peoples, but also on account of the very friendly, as 
well as the commercial, relations which have long existed between 
the two countries, and which are now developing year by year. 

Having been asked by the South Place Ethical Society to give 
a lecture on Norway in the series of lectures on National Life 
and Thought in various countries, which are now being delivered 
here, I do not think, in doing so, that I need trouble you to 
any great extent with the ancient history of Norway ; it is a very 
long and complicated one, and a dry historical resume of it would 
hardly interest you. I fancy it is more about the National Life 



Norway. 



183 



and thought of the Norway of today, about our history and our 
aspirations of the present times, that you are interested to hear 
something. To understand this all the better, I^must, however, 
refer for a few minutes to what has taken place before the 
beginning of this century, and for this purpose I will divide the 
History of Norway into three epochs : — The First being from the 
earliest times, when the country was divided into a number of 
small kingdoms, which King Harold the Fairhaired eventually 
gathered into one, when the Norwegians were known as one of 
the most warlike and daring of all nationalities ; when they crossed 
the seas in their galleys, not only to Iceland, England, France, and 
to the Mediterranean, but even to America, of which country 
they are the first discoverers ; and when they were ruled by a 
succession of famous kings, such as King Sverre, King Olaf 
Trygvason, and King Olaf the Holy, down to the year of 1450, 
when Norway, after a number of disastrous wars, became a 
province of Denmark. The Second Epoch we will call the time of 
the Union with Denmark. This lasted for nearly 400 years, — from 
1450 to 1814. There is a good deal to be said about this period ; 
no doubt, it was most disastrous to Norway, and the best the 
Norwegians now can do, is to try and forget it. I ought, perhaps, 
to mention here, that during this period the Norwegian peasantry 
maintained and asserted their old independence, and would not 
suffer anyone to interfere in their rights and privileges, and, as 
long as this was not attempted, they seemed to have cared very 
little about the management of the rest of the country. This 
apathy may, no doubt, be explained by the fact that, at the 
beginning of the union, there were practical men of the old lead- 
ing chiefs of the peasantry left. King Sverre had, for purposes of 
his own, tried to crush down and exterminate these bold and 
independent leaders of the people, but the spirit of those brave 
Norsemen was not to be quelled altogether; nay, it has shown 
itself to be alive to this very day. The Danes soon discovered 
that these bold and obstinate peasants were not to be trifled with, 
and an attempt was made to link them more closely to Denmark, 
by inviting and inducing some of the sons of the old peasant 
families to visit, and stay for some time in, Denmark. These sons 
were eventually to be made noblemen, which, however, a good 
many of them thought they already were. They were at first to 
go through a course of military discipline, and to learn fine and 
courtly manners ; but the attempt to make these sturdy Norsemen 
fine cavaliers and courtiers proved a most miserable failure, for 






1 84 National Life and Thought. 

the lads gave the officers and their teachers a sound thrashing, 
and got up a mutiny, and had at last to be sent home. Another 
attempt was that of trying to organise a Norwegian corps of Life 
Guards in attendance upon the king at Copenhagen; but this 
was just as unsuccessful, and terminated in the same way. 

All the officials in Norway during that period were Danes, 
and were, on the whole, very insolent and overbearing to the 
people. To show, however, that the old spirit of the Norway 
peasants did not tamely submit to this sort of treatment, I will 
relate an anecdote, which will better serve to illustrate the char- 
acter of the people at that time than all the historical facts I 
can give you. The Danish officials I have referred to, such as 
judges, sheriffs, and even clergymen, did not at that time live 
exactly the life they ought to have led, and often neglected the 
business of the people to suit their own comfort and convenience. 
On one occasion — it happened in Valders, one of the wildest 
mountain districts of Norway — that the sheriff, the judge, un- 
der-sheriff, and the counsel who came to the Assizes, and who 
had been invited to dinner by the clergyman, who lived hard-by, 
forgot all about the people who were waiting for them outside 
the court-house. When at last the satiated and inebriated guests 
came rolling out of the house on their way to the court, they 
were seized hold of by the people, who had ranged themselves 
in a row on either side of the door, and judge, sheriff and 
lawyers were all soundly thrashed in their turn, as they were 
passed along from man to man. 

We now approach the Third Epoch in the Norwegian history, 
the one during which the country regained its independence 
and the sole control over its affairs. 

Many of you will remember that, during the wars of Napoleon, 
Sweden foolishly joined Russia against Napoleon, and, later on, 
England, Prussia and Austria also joined this Alliance, while 
Denmark already had allied herself to Napoleon and his fate. 
Russia had promised Norway to Sweden in return for the ser- 
vices rendered them by the then Crown Prince, Karl Johun of 
Sweden. This Karl Johun was the well-known French General 
Jean Bernadotte, who had just been elected Crown Prince, or 
successor to the feeble Swedish king, Karl XIII. 

Karl Johun invaded the southern part of Denmark, and beat 
the Danish army, which was stationed in Holstein. The Danish 
king then lost all courage, and, by the Treaty of Kul in 1814, 
ceded Norway to Sweden. When this news reached Norway, 



Norway. 185 

the old spirit of the Norwegian, which seemed to have been 
long asleep or enthralled, came to life again. They would not 
tamely submit to being handed over as mere goods and chattels 
to Sweden and the ambitious Prince Bernadotte, and preferred 
the then Danish Governor of Norway, Prince Christian Frederick, 
whom they elected as their sovereign. 

A meeting of delegates from all parts of the country was con- 
vened at Eidsvold, not far from the Norwegian capital, where 
the representatives of the nation framed and adopted the Con- 
stitution or Grundlov of 17th May 1814, of which I shall speak 
later on. 

As soon as the Swedes heard that Norway would not submit 
to the conditions of the Treaty of Klfl, they invaded Norway, 
with the Crown Prince, Karl Johun Bernadotte, at their head. 
They met with a gallant resistance, but Prince Christian Fred- 
erick, the new king, soon saw the hopelessness of the struggle ; 
he resigned, and returned to Denmark. A convention was then 
held at Moss, where the Norwegians accepted the Swedish king 
as their sovereign, on the condition that their Constitution of 
17th of May should remain intact, except such alterations as 
the union with Sweden rendered necessary. An extraordinary 
Storthing, or National Assembly, was summoned at Christiania, 
and on the 4th November 18 14, Norway was declared to be a 
u free, independent, and indivisible kingdom, united with Sweden 
under one king." The Constitution framed at Eidsvold was 
retained, forming the present Grundlov, or Fundamental Law of 
the kingdom. It is generally acknowledged to be the most free 
and democratic of any Constitution in the world. The people 
obtained by this such an amount of political liberty as no other 
nation can boast of, and which, in fact, it has taken the Nor- 
wegians themselves some time to understand fully. 

It is now well known that Karl Johun Bernadotte only agreed 
to the Norwegians retaining this Constitution as he found he 
could not then conquer or subdue the Norwegians ; but he lived 
in the firm hope that he would soon find a fitting opportunity 
to establish his power more firmly in Norway, perhaps even to 
seize it, and make it a province of Sweden. He was especially 
very anxious that the Norwegian Parliament should grant him 
an absolute veto, which the king, according to the Constitution, 
did not possess. On two occasions the sturdy patriots in the 
Parliament resolutely declined to entertain his proposal, and, to 
this very day, the merely suspensive veto remains one of the 



1 86 National Life and Thought. 

most important features of the Norwegian Constitution. I 
may here mention an incident which shows the kind of people 
Karl Johun had to deal with. A few years after the union was 
entered into, the Norwegian Parliament proposed a bill for the 
abolition of nobility. The country was, in fact, too poor con- 
sistently to keep up and maintain an aristocracy. The few 
counts and barons that still were found in the country were 
all Danish, and of very recent origin. The really true and 
ancient nobility was the leading peasants or b'indes, descendants 
of the old jarls or earls and chieftains in the land ; but then 
plain people did not want any titles or handles to their names. 
Among the many great acts for which we have to thank the 
patriots of those early years of our independence, I think that 
the abolition of nobility was one of the greatest services they 
could have rendered their country. But Karl Johun Berna- 
dotte, who by this time had become king of the two countries, 
on the death of the old king, Karl XIII., was not of this opinion. 
He felt that the abolition of the nobility was another blow at his 
power in Norway, and for two sessions he refused his sanction 
to the bill. But, according to the Constitution, any bill passed 
three times by the Parliament becomes law, whether the king 
likes it or no. 

In 182 1, the bill came on for the third reading, and the king 
thought he would try to frighten the Parliament into throwing 
out the bill, and for this purpose he commanded some Swedish 
men-of-war to the Norwegian capital. These ships were moored 
almost outside the very windows of the National Assembly, and, 
during the debate on the third reading of the bill, he had given 
orders to fire blank shots from the guns of the Swedish ships. 
The very windows were rattling from the shots while the dis- 
cussion was going on, but the brave representatives of the people 
were not to be frightened into submission. The bill was passed 
for the third time, and became law, to the great chagrin of the 
king. I will, at this point, relate another anecdote which also 
tends to illustrate the independence of the Norwegian peasantry. 
One of the leading men in the Parliament, who bore a noble 
name, and who naturally opposed the bill for the abolition of 
titles and nobility, was remonstrating with one of the peasant 
representatives about this bill, and told him that, if the bill was 
passed, he would say " Farewell " to the mountains of Norway. 
The peasant only replied, " And the mountains of Norway will 
echo — ' Well! — well/"' The Constitution of the country was 



Norway. 187 

prepared in a very short space of time — in two or three weeks — 
and was framed on the Constitution of France of 1791, or that 
of the United States of America and that of Spain of 181 2, and 
is, no doubt, a very masterpiece of its kind. I have said before, 
that it is the freest of any Constitution in the old or the new 
world. It has not imposed upon the country an Upper House, 
a House of Lords, a Senate, or whatever you may like to call the 
august assemblies in all countries, who seem to be appointed 
as guardians or nurses to the naughty children in the popular 
chamber. Now, here is a lesson for our English cousins ! The 
hereditary chamber you possess is already doomed ! There has 
been some talk of mending or ending it. I say, take a leaf from 
the Norwegian Constitution, and end it. I look upon the National 
Assembly of a country in this way, — The electors of a free and 
civilised country ought to elect the best men they have to legislate 
and manage the country for them, without appointing another 
set of men — a sort of a board of guardians — over them, to see 
that they, the elect of the country, do not misbehave themselves. 
An Upper House in a National Assembly may have been useful 
in times gone by, but I think the time has now come that an 
intelligent nation can do without these guardians over their best 
men. I, for my part, think it shows a want of confidence in the 
men you elect. 

Our Parliament, which we call the Storthing, consists at present 
of 114 representatives. As soon as it is assembled, it proceeds 
to elect from among its members a fourth part of their number 
for a kind of select committee, which we call the Lagthing, and 
which is the nearest approach we have to an upper house; but it 
will not be right to call it so, for these twenty-eight men are part 
of the representatives elected, and if you have a Liberal majority 
in the Parliament, the members elected for the select committee 
are naturally selected from amongst the Liberal majority. As an 
act of grace, a few members of the Opposition are allowed to be 
elected on this committee, the lagthing. The remaining three- 
fourths of the representatives constitute the Odelsthing, where all 
legislation is initiated. When a bill has passed the odelsthing, it 
is sent up to the lagthing, which, according to the Constitution, 
has a limited suspensory power of revising or rejecting the bills 
sent up. But you can easily understand that, as this select com- 
mittee is elected by the men with whom they are in sympathy, much 
opposition or obstruction is not met with in the lagthing. If a 
bill should be twice rejected by the lagthing, a joint meeting is 



1 88 National Life and TJwught. 

held with the odelsthing, at which a majority of two-thirds will 
carry the measure. As already stated, the royal sanction can 
only be refused twice. 

The present king — King Oscar II. — evidently believed, until 
quite lately, that he possessed an absolute veto. It will here be 
necessary for me shortly to refer to the political crisis we had in 
Norway with reference to this very question. The Constitution 
of 1814 had one fault. According to it, the Ministers of State 
had not seats in the National Assembly, and the Liberal party, 
finding this to be a great defect in their constitution, proposed in 
1872 what the Conservative press of the country — we have Con- 
servatives even in our Democratic country — pronounced a most 
revolutionary and dangerous measure — that of admitting the 
Ministers of State to the sittings of the National Assembly, and 
to take part in its proceedings. But, mark you, the proposed bill 
did not give them the right to vote, so, I have no doubt, you will 
find it was not a very dangerous measure after all. The first time 
the bill was carried by 80 votes against 29 ; but the Government 
at the time, which was a Conservative one, although they only 
had a support of about 30 out of 114 — we had not yet got real 
Parliamentary government introduced — was evidently jealous of 
the growing power and influence of the "peasant party" in the 
Parliament, and advised the king to refuse his sanction to the 
bill. The Government also saw in the proposed reform the 
threatened introduction of the Parliamentary system, with the 
prospect of their own fall, as they would have to depend upon 
a majority in the Storthing to maintain their position. Three 
Parliaments, after three successive elections, carried the bill, each 
time by an increased majority — the last time, in 1880, by the 
overwhelming majority of 93 out of in. It was then generally 
expected that the king and his Government would at length 
comply with the wishes of the people, but the king finally re- 
fused his sanction to the bill, declaring, at the same time, that 
•his right to the absolute veto was "above all doubt." He has, 
however, since then been obliged to alter this, his conviction, and 
he has actually had to sign the bill which involved the question 
of the veto. The Norwegians were not, however, going to let 
the matter rest with the royal declaration. From that moment 
a serious struggle arose between the people and the king, and 
centered itself upon the question of the existence or non-existence 
of an absolute veto on the part of the Crown. In England it is 
generally assumed, and is recognised by such a high authority as 



Norway. 189 

Sir Thomas Erskine May, that an absolute veto is practically 
unconstitutional — that is to say, illegal. Although, theoretically, 
the veto is a prerogative of the Crown, it has in England long 
ago become effete and obsolete. It was hard, however, to under- 
stand how the king of so enlightened and free a nation as the 
Norwegians could, in these advanced times, set up a claim for 
such an antiquated prerogative. The Parliament now proceeded 
to adopt the last resource provided by the Constitution — it im- 
peached the whole of the ministry before the supreme court of 
the realm, or, as it is called, the Rigsret, with a view of obtaining 
the dismissal of the ministry. The first charge against the 
ministers was having acted contrary to the interests of the 
country by advising the king to refuse his sanction to the 
amendment of the law for admitting the ministers to the Parlia- 
ment ; and to this was added two other charges, one involving a 
question of supply, and another about the refusal of the Govern- 
ment to appoint two additional members on the Committee of 
the State Railways. 

The result of this remarkable trial can be stated very shortly. 

The ministry was dismissed one by one, the king being com- 
pelled to accept the judgment of the supreme court. It was, 
however, very critical times that the Norwegians then passed 
through. It was rumoured that the king intended a coup d'etat 
by the aid of Swedish troops, and of a few Norwegian military 
officers ; the Norwegian army could not be depended upon, as it 
was well known that the men sympathised with the Parliament ; 
but wiser counsels prevailed, and although the king attempted to 
form a conservative government again, which, however, only lasted 
a few months, he eventually appointed'a liberal ministry, with John 
Sverdrup at its head. The liberal party had then a great victory 
all along the line, and the question of the absolute veto was 
settled once for all. It is not likely that any king in Norway will 
claim this again. It is, of course, in itself absurd to suppose that 
such a free and democratic Constitution as that of Norway, with 
no upper house, and the large power vested in the people, should 
give the king an absolute veto. In this struggle the peasantry 
and their representatives again played a prominent part, and 
without their aid this victory would not have been won. Although 
Parliamentary government has not yet been carried out to per- 
fection, it may be looked upon as the future popular form of 
government that will be generally acknowledged. 

I must next refer to the position of the king in the country. 



190 National Life and Thought. 

He represents the executive of the country ; but his person is holy, 
and his ministers alone can be held responsible to the Parliament. 
The king can declare war and conclude peace with foreign 
countries, and has the command of the Norwegian army and 
navy. In an aggressive war he must, however, have the sanction 
of the Parliament to use them. The king elects his ministry and 
all higher officials, and he is, besides, the head of the state Church. 

In all questions of supply of taxes and customs, the king has 
nothing to say ; his and the royal upanages must be voted yearly, 
and some time ago the Parliament took the liberty to reduce some 
of these. A few years ago a bill was passed dispensing with the 
old formula, "To his most gracious majesty, the king," which 
was used on all state documents and addresses to his majesty. 
Henceforth the formula is to be only, " To the king." All this 
tends to show that the true democratic spirit, which the patriots 
of 1 814 imparted to our Constitution, is not slumbering, but that 
we gradually are developing it in the direction which they, no 
doubt, intended. 

Norway has not yet got Universal Suffrage ; but it is in the 
programme of the liberal party, and will, no doubt, be carried in 
a few years. At present every Norwegian of twenty-five years of 
age, who (1) in the country possesses freehold land, or has been 
a tenant of such a property for five years ; or (2) who is a burgess 
of any town ; or (3) possesses property in land or in houses to 
the value of ^30 ; or (4) who has paid taxes to the state on a 
yearly income of at least ^30 in the country, and ^45 in the 
towns, so you see we have already a very extended suffrage. 

The elections for members of the National Assembly takes 
place every three years. The mode of election is, unfortunately, 
at present indirect ; but this will, no doubt, be altered in time, 
now that the communication between the different parts of the 
country is so much better. At present, the electors first nominate 
a number of deputies, or an election committee, for each town or 
county; and these among themselves again elect the number of 
Members of Parliament representing the town or the district. In 
Norway the Members of Parliament are paid. They are allowed 
12 kroner, or 13s. 6d. a day while in session, and their travelling 
expenses. I think it is only right that the state, and especially 
a democratic one, should in some way remunerate the representa- 
tives for the loss of time they incur in the public service of their 
country. 

Norway has, for the last fifty years, possessed a most perfect system 



Norway. 191 

of local government. It is only a year or two since you introduced 
it in England, but I doubt if the powers of the County Councils 
are as full and thorough-going as the Norwegian system. I will 
not take up your time by going into details of local government 
in Norway; suffice it to say that the elected Board, called 
" Kommune Bertyrelsi," and which is divided into two — the 
Formandskab, or the executive ; and the Representantskab, a 
larger body, is entrusted with all necessary powers to manage 
the affairs of the " Kommune," as it is called. 

From the beginning of the next year, the jury system will be 
introduced into the country, but in criminal cases only, so, on the 
whole, we think we are getting our house into better and better 
order for coming generations. 

I must next touch upon the position that Norway and Sweden 
occupy in the union between the two countries. It will be remem- 
bered that, according to the Act of Union of 1814, Norway was 
declared to be a free, independent, and indivisible kingdom, 
united with Sweden under one king. The king is really the only 
thing we have in common, besides ambassadors and consuls 
abroad. Each country has its own parliament, its own govern- 
ment, its own army and navy. Each country impose their own 
taxes and customs, and are really two distinct kingdoms — a fact 
often misunderstood, or not known, in England. The king resides 
for the greater part of the year in Stockholm, his Swedish capital, 
but comes on two or three visits to Norway every year to open or 
close the Parliament, or on matters of State. Three members of 
the Norwegian Government are always in attendance upon the 
king at Stockholm, and through whom he transacts his Nor- 
wegian business. 

At present there is a great controversy going on in Norway 
about a point in the Union which has been overlooked from the 
very first, and never since, until now, has been seriously discussed. 
Strange to say, in the Norwegian Ministry, there is no Foreign 
Minister. At the time of the Union, in 18 14, nothing had been 
settled with regard to the share that Norway was to have in the 
transaction of diplomatic affairs with foreign countries. Fortu- 
nately, Norway is very little troubled with diplomatic affairs ; but, 
in 1835, a resolution was issued to the effect that, when the 
Swedish Foreign Minister was discussing diplomatic matters with 
the king, which concerned both countries, or Sweden only, another 
Swedish councillor, and the Norway minister at Stockholm, should 
be present ; but if the matters concerned Norway alone, the Nor- 



192 National Life and Thought. 

wegian minister alone was to attend the deliberations of the king 
and his Foreign Swedish Minister. This arrangement has not 
always proved satisfactory to the Norwegians ; but, in the mean- 
time, this state of affairs , have been allowed to drift on, and 
gradually the Swedish Foreign Minister has come to be looked 
upon as the Foreign Minister to Norway also. But nothing is 
said about this in the Norwegian Constitution, or in the Act of 
Union ; and, as the Swedish Foreign Minister cannot be held 
responsible to the Norwegian Government or Parliament, it is no 
wonder that the Norwegians wish to have this point settled. As 
a matter of fact, in the diplomatic relations of the two countries 
with foreign powers, Norway has not enjoyed equal right and 
share with Sweden, as she, according to the Act of Union, had a 
right to expect and demand. Only last summer we had an instance 
of this. Norway was officially represented at the Paris Exhibition, 
while Sweden would not take part in the celebration of the cen- 
tenary of the French Revolution. Before the day of opening, the 
Swedish and Norwegian Ambassador in Paris had been requested 
by the Norwegian commissioner to be present at the Norwegian 
department, and receive the President on his tour of inspection 
through the Exhibition, but this the Ambassador flatly refused to 
do. It was afterwards ascertained that the Ambassador had 
received instructions from the Swedish Foreign Minister in Stock- 
holm not to be present and represent Norway at the Exhibition. 
The Norwegians could not but look upon this as an insult, but 
we can neither call the Foreign Minister or the Ambassador into 
account; we could only resent it in the public press. This 
occurrence, and many others, in which the Swedes seem to show 
that they want to have the upper hand, have given rise to the 
controversy I mentioned, and at present it seems that the Nor- 
wegians want to appoint their own consuls and representatives 
abroad, which they, according to their Constitution, have a full 
right to do, and even to appoint their own Foreign Minister, 
unless a satisfactory arrangement is arrived at with Sweden. This 
may hereafter give rise to serious dissensions between the two 
countries, and I mention it because it is part of our political 
aspiration at the present moment to assert our just claim to equal 
rights and an equal position in the Union ; in fact, it seems that 
the discussion and the settlement of the matter will, on the part 
of the Norwegians, be carried on on the following lines : " Full 
equality, or out of the Union." 

It is especially on this and similar points that there is a feeling 



Norway. 193 

of jealousy between the two countries, but otherwise the two 
nations get on very well together, and I hope the Union may 
long exist, and that the two sister countries will prosper side by 
side and in full harmony. Some few still dream of the Union, or 
an amalgamation, of the three Scand countries — Norway, Sweden, 
and Denmark. I myself think that this may come to pass, say 
in five hundred years or so ; but, in the meantime, each nation 
must be allowed to develop independently. I do not think we 
need to trouble ourselves about this amalgamation in the far 
future ; at present, it is our duty to develop our national charac- 
teristics, our political liberty, our literature, our arts, on national 
lines, and quite independent of one another. Take away, for in- 
stance, the national element from our literature, from our arts, our 
music, and we should not command the attention and respect we 
at present enjoy. If our authors were to fall into the style of the 
Swedish or the French writers, our musicians to be influenced by 
the German or French school, and so on during our present 
development, as a new-born nation, we should be nowhere. 
Nothing is more contemptible than a dandified French-Norwegian, 
a German-struck Norwegian, or an Anglicised- Norwegian with 
sporting and betting proclivities ! I maintain that, in the case 
of nations, each must, for the present, and for some time to 
come, develop the national element in their character, in their 
literature, and in their arts, just as individuals must develop their 
personal characteristics to make themselves worthy of the respect 
and friendship of their fellow-creatures. To illustrate more plainly 
what I mean, I would, as a contrast to the class of individuals 
upon whom our hope of the future is built, only mention a class 
of beings we now find in our midst — a class of beings who 
evidently have no independence of character or independent way 
of thinking, and who seem to have lost all the characteristics of 
the nation to which they belong — I mean the mashers. They are 
living proofs of how individuals as well as nations can deteriorate. 
I suppose the English have their ideal of what an Englishman 
should be. I think they would hardly present a masher to the 
world as a representative one ! Unless the development of 
national as well as personal character is carried out on the lines 
I have referred to, we shall all be mashers, and have nations of 
mashers, and the decline and fall of the British and other empires 
will soon follow. We Norwegians are a small nation, and we 
must not forget that our very existence among the nations of the 
world depends upon our upholding the national character and 

N 



194 National Life and Thought. 

independence of our race. I see in the distant future a time 
when the nations and the peoples of the earth have approached 
each other more than now, understood each other more than 
now, and have even amalgamated with one another more than 
now, perhaps in a kind of international brotherhood, but I hope, 
even then, that both nations and individuals will preserve and 
retain what is great and good in their national and personal 
characters. 

I must not forget to say a few words about the Norwegian 
people themselves, in their daily life and work. The Norwegians 
have a hard struggle with nature for their existence. The Nor- 
wegians of to-day must be divided into two distinct classes — the 
Norwegian b'indes, or peasants, and the totvnspeople. The latter 
are neither more nor less interesting, neither better nor worse, 
than most town populations in Europe. The better classes in 
the towns are mostly of foreign origin — Danish, German, and 
even English — whose forefathers immigrated into Norway in the 
early part of the century, soon after we had gained our independ- 
ence, when business began to look up and improve, while the 
people of the official classes were formerly almost wholly of 
Danish origin from the time of the union with Denmark. 

The Norwegian peasants, however, are, and have been, the 
kernel of the nation. They are the freeholders of the property on 
which they live, and where, as a rule, their forefathers have lived 
for centuries before them. From the earliest ages the peasantry 
have been absolute owners of the land. Even during the long 
union with Denmark, the Norwegian peasant was, as I already have 
referred to, the free and independent master of his own farm. To 
him the English system of leasehold is incomprehensible, and he 
cannot believe his ears when he hears it explained to him. I 
believe that Norway is one of the few, if not the only country in 
Europe, where the peasantry never have been serfs. Their udal 
laws trained them in the management of their own affairs, and 
produced that feeling of self-respect and independence which 
the possession of property, and land in particular, gives. Nature 
has not been bountiful to them ; in many cases they have even 
to carry up the soil on to the rocks to grow the necessary corn 
for their existence, but still there is hardly a happier and more 
independent man than the Norwegian bjfnde. He is the de- 
scendant of the old "jarls," or chieftains of the land, its true and 
ancient nobility, and many of the peasant families descend from 
the old Norwegian kings. I must here relate a story which 



Norway. 195 

throws a deal of light on the independent character of these 
sturdy peasants. Soon after Karl Johun had become king in 
1 8 14, he had to undertake a journey through Gudbrandsdalen r 
one of the finest villages in the country. In those days travelling 
was not so quick and convenient as now, and the king had to 
put up at night at the farms of the peasants, who generally 
received a message a day or two beforehand to prepare for the 
reception of the king. On the occasion I refer to, a wealthy 
peasant, by the name of Tofti, in the upper end of the valley, had 
received notice to receive the king, and when the king and his 
suite entered the room where the dinner was to be served, they 
discovered that, at the head of the table, a smaller table had 
been placed crossways, and was laid for only two persons. The 
king was conducted by his host to this table, and the Swedish 
Chamberlain, who was in attendance upon the king, thought, 
as a matter of course, that the other seat was for him, and pro- 
ceeded to take it, when the peasant tapped him on the shoulder 
and pointed to a place at the other table, saying, as he sat 
down by the side of the king, " This table is only for those of 
royal blood." I can hardly imagine a peasant in another country 
speaking thus in the presence of a king. The townspeople 
address the king as " Your Majesty" or by the polite "de," or 
" you," but a Norwegian peasant addresses him with the familiar 
"du,"or " thou," which is only used when people are intimate 
with one another. I have on several occasions heard the 
peasants speak to the king, and it has amused me greatly to hear 
them address him in this familiar way. During many political 
difficulties, the Norwegian peasants have been the saviours of the 
country, and from their ranks have sprung some of the most 
celebrated men of our day. I am certain that no other country 
possesses so many men in official positions, such as doctors, 
clergymen, engineers, and teachers, who are peasant-born, and 
even often from the farm-labouring and working-classes, and 
that no other country has so many eminent poets, artists, men of 
science, and statesmen, who have also risen from the peasantry. 
Lately we have had three bishops — one is still alive — who were 
peasants, and you must take your degree with unusually high 
honours if you aspire to be a bishop in Norway. Bjornson, the 
well-known poet and dramatist, is the son of a clergyman, who 
worked his way up from being a poor peasant lad. Ivan Aaser, 
the great linguist, Vinje, the poet, Gufbory, a talented writer, 
are all peasant-born. Slfredsvig, the well-known painter, is the 



196 National Life and Thought. 

son of a working-man, and a great number of our best painters, 
and nearly all our sculptors, are of the peasantry. Svendsen, 
the well-known composer, is the son of a working-man ; one of 
our most gifted editors, and three of the members of the late 
Liberal Government, were all peasant-born, and several peasants 
have been presidents or speakers in the Parliament. Mr Samuel 
Laing. an English traveller, and father of the ex-member for 
Orkney and Shetland, speaks as follows of the Norwegian peasant : 
" The remarkable firmness, and moderation, and judgment with 
which these people have exercised the legislative powers which 
the Constitution entirely has vested in their representatives, place 
them, in the moral estimate of Europeans nations, in a much 
higher rank than those who have received a much greater share 
of public attention in this country." 

Norway ranks high among European countries in the matter 
of education. All the peasants, and all belonging to the working- 
classes, can now read and write, and they all know the Constitu- 
tion and the history of their country on their fingers' ends ; they 
read all new books ; the parish libraries all over the country 
supply them with sufficient reading, but it is also well known 
that the better off among the peasantry buy the modern litera- 
ture, and lend them out to their neighbours. Thus Bjornson's 
and Ibsen's works are read just as eagerly and as early by the 
peasantry as by the townspeople. You find a newspaper in 
every farmstead, and even in the cottages of the farm-labourers. 
Besides the usual national schools, we have the so-called Folke- 
hoiskoler (high schools for the people), where instruction and 
lectures are given to grown-up people of both sexes. 

I said that the Norwegian peasant carries on a hard struggle 
for his existence. It is very difficult indeed to understand the 
hardships he has to go through, unless you see it with your eyes. 
The peasantry may be divided into two classes — the coast popu- 
lation, and the inland population. The people on the coast 
live to a great extent by fishing, but they have also small farms 
to cultivate. In the winter months the greater part of the 
population on the coast proceed often hundreds of miles in 
their open boats, or by steamer, to the great fisheries in the 
north of Norway. Few people could endure the life they lead 
during the time the fishing goes on. They often remain in their 
boats out at sea on the fishing grounds for one, two, or three 
days, frequently through wet, and hauling in their catch at sea 
in a cold of which we have little idea. And when they come 



Norway. 197 

ashore they often fail in getting accommodation for the night, 
and half of them are not able to get their food cooked, but must 
content themselves with eating it cold, and with a " dram," and 
with sleeping in their stiff frozen clothes, packed closely together, 
like herrings in a barrel, on the floor, or even in a standing posi- 
tion, one leaning against the other, in a close and stifling atmo- 
sphere. Sometimes they must go back to their boats, and cover 
themselves with anything they can find, and, shivering from cold, 
spend the night under the Arctic sky. Many catch illnesses, 
with which they are troubled all their life. Rheumatism is a 
general complaint among the fishermen. A great number every 
year lose their lives in stormy weather. Often the fishing turns 
out badly, but they go at it again next year. It is not gain 
alone which tempts them ; the life itself is so adventurous, they 
have heard accounts of it from their boyhood, and do not rest 
till they get off to the great fishing grounds to try their luck. 

The Norwegians, as you know, are great sailors, and there are 
now about sixty or seventy thousand men engaged in the shipping 
of the country. Next to England, Norway possesses the greatest 
fleet of merchant ships. 

Of the inland population, the people employed in the forest 
industry of the country undergo the greatest hardships. I can- 
not enter into detail of their life in the great vast forests, where 
they sometimes stop for weeks at a time, but I will give you one 
or two sketches of the kind of life they lead. After having been 
felling trees in deep snow in the forest the whole day, they return 
at night to a rough sort of a shanty, built of logs, about eight by 
twelve feet, with no doors or windows. On a slab in one of the 
corners they keep up a fire all night, the smoke escaping through a 
hole in the roof; but the doorway and the chimney are open, and 
the hut is exceedingly draughty. Opposite the fire they make a 
bed, on some logs, of some hay and moss. They never undress; in 
the evening they pull off their boots and stockings, which they 
dry while sitting with their bare feet before the lire, but they put 
both stockings and boots on again before they lie down. In very 
severe weather, it happens that the clothes, on the side near the 
rime-frosted wall, become frozen fast to it ; while the other side, 
which is turned to the fire, becomes smoking hot and steaming. 

When the floating begins, in the spring, the men have to wade 
about in the rivers, often to their shoulders, without changing 
clothes for weeks. Sometimes they lose all feeling in their feet, 
and are then obliged to take off their boots and stockings, and 



198 National Life and Thought. 

rub them until feeling is restored ; often they have to lie down to 
get a little sleep, with nothing over them as a covering except 
branches of the pine tree. 

The occupation of "floating" is a dangerous and health- 
destroying one. It is a wonder that more lives are not lost. It 
is this life of adventure and peril, and the solitude in these parts, 
that attract the Norwegian peasant to it. For every one who 
meets his death in the cataract, or succumbs from slow disease, 
there are only too many to take his place. Norway has over 750 
sawmills, so you understand large numbers find their livelihood 
in this industry, and that timber forms a great article of export. 

Every year thousands of our English cousins now visit our 
country, and we bid fair to become the great hunting ground in 
Europe for tourists and sportsmen, and we, on our part, wish you 
hearty welcome. I only trust that my countrymen will keep their 
heads cool at the great influx of visitors from all countries, and on 
the great praise they and their country receive in the numerous 
articles and books which continually are being published about 
Norway. If you will notice, there is scarcely any other country 
about which so many guide-books and books of travel at present 
are published here in England as about Norway. 

Before I conclude, I must refer for a moment or two to the 
literature of the country, which has now become such an im- 
portant factor in the national thought and life of the Norwegians. 
Time will not permit me to go back to the dawn of our present 
literature, when the names of Wergelund and Welhaven was on 
everybody's lips. I will at once mention the two names in our 
modern literature which have now an almost world-wide reputa- 
tion. First of all, I must mention the great national poet of 
Norway par excellence, Bjornstgorne Bjornson. He struck, in his 
very first attempt, a chord in the heart of the people, which gave 
a new impulse to the national life that was dawning on Norway. 
The poet became a patriot ; he thinks that a poet need not neces- 
sarily shut himself up in a room, and, in a velvet jacket, and 
with long curls, write sweet, sentimental verses to the moon or 
some fair lady. He mixed with the people, learnt their yearnings 
and their aspirations ; at great risk to his reputation and his 
financial position, he joined the ranks of the people, he thrilled the 
minds of his countrymen as he spoke to them of their duty to 
themselves and their country, and stirred up the old independent 
spirit of the Norsemen. The part he took in the political struggle 
between the king and the Norwegian people some years ago, and 



Norzvay. 1 99 

the part he at present is playing in Norwegian politics, is of the 
greatest importance to us, and, in the future, when he will be 
better understood than now, the historian will inscribe his name 
in the honourable place it deserves in the list of champions for 
his country's rights. And how could it be otherwise ? Look at 
Bjornson himself! Is he not the very ideal of a Norwegian — the 
fine, broad-shouldered figure, with the noble head and the lion's 
mane, looks every inch a jarl, one of the chieftians of old, as fine 
a representation of the old Norseman as you would wish. He has 
been called by one of his friends the political conscience of the 
Norwegian people, and I think it very appropriate. Where should 
we have been during the late political struggle if he, before any 
one else dared to do so, had not courageously spoken out on 
behalf of his countrymen, and reminded them of their duties, and 
what their forefathers had done before them. 

No, the Norwegian people have not sung his songs or read his 
tales in vain ; they, at least, understand him and love him, not- 
withstanding what certain sages and wise heads may say to the 
contrary. At the same time, his latest work shows him to be the 
true poet, who finds his way to the inmost chords of the human 
heart, and shows them the way to a truer and better understanding 
of our existence here, and of our duty to one another, than all 
the sermons and goody-goody talk that has been levelled at the 
heads of humanity for generations. Bjornson is the ideal optimist. 
He loves life ; he loves his country ; but he loves humanity 
above all. 

The name of our other great poet is Henrik Ibsen. Until 
lately, Ibsen was little known in England ; but, after the perform- 
ance of two of his plays last summer, and the many articles that 
have appeared about him in English papers and magazines, his 
name is now known to most intellectual Englishmen and women. 
It would take hours to go into his numerous works, and the 
general development of his remarkable talent. He also began 
as a writer of historical plays, which appealed to the feelings of his 
countrymen ; but gradually he became the philosophical poet, and 
in bitter satires told his countrymen their little follies and vanities, 
opening up at the same time a new vista of life to them, of which 
they never dreamt. Ibsen is a pessimist and realist of the first 
water. How could he, with his knowledge of human nature and 
human weaknesses, be otherwise ? He has been called the poet 
of woman ; and, as far as many of us believe that the salvation 
of the world is to come from woman, that of society is to res t 



200 National Life and Thought. 

upon a sounder, healthier, and happier basis than hitherto, 
woman must step in and take her share jin^the work of progress, 
and not be the plaything — the doll — she hitherto has been, then 
it is right to call him the woman's poet. I prefer to call him 
the Shakespeare of the nineteenth century, for Ibsen is not for 
woman alone, not for Norway alone ; he is for all mankind, for all 
countries where civilisation has left its mark. 

Of other authors I will only mention Jonas Lie, the Dickens 
of Norway, and Alexander Kielland, the great satirist. We have 
painters and sculptors, and men of science, of European renown ; 
we have musicians who have made their mark, and of these you 
well know the name of Edward Grieg. I spoke, at the beginning 
of this lecture, about the invasions of the ancient Norsemen. I 
did so purposely. Now, a thousand years later, we are contem- 
plating another invasion of your empire ; with our authors, our 
poets, our artists and our bards in the front, we intend to invade 
your country again, but not in the fashion of our ancestors. No, 
we want to make way to your hearts, to gain your sympathy for 
our aspirations, for our national life and movements, to help us 
to break down national prejudices, that the nations of the world 
all the sooner can stand side by side, hand in hand, all working 
for that great aim of mankind — the happiness of the human race. 



XI. 

S WE BEN. 

EIRIKR MAGNUSSON, M.A. 

WHEN the veil of myth and legend lifts, and historical 
light first begins to throw a glimmer over the life of the 
Swedish nation, we find the country inhabited by two kindred 
races. The southern lowlands, together with the island of Gotland, 
are occupied by a people who call themselves Gautar or Goths. 
But the great central basin,- forming the watershed of the vast 
lake system of Wenern, Vettern Miilaren, and a multitude of other 
inland standing waters, is held by the race who call themselves 
Sviar, Svear, Swedes. The Aborigines, the Fins, and the Lapps 
had already been pushed by the southern invaders far to the 
north, where the former maintained themselves chiefly by hunting 
and fishing, the latter by nomadic pursuits, even as they do to this 
day. 

All human civilisation is, in the first instance, a struggle, more 
or less victorious, with Nature. All races that begin this struggle 
with the combined forces of land and water at once are generally 
in advance in civilisation of those races who inhabit vast con- 
tinental prairie or steppe territories. Hence we find that island 
populations and lake populations are not only the first to organise 
themselves into civilised communities ; but when they receive 
civilisation through foreign impulse, are the quickest in adapting 
themselves to it. Thus, in the very dawn of Scandinavian history, 
we find that the lake districts of Sweden are inhabited by a people 
who form not only a civilised community, but have already 
advanced far in the art of organising a state. The Svear maintain 
a general supremacy over the whole country, and have managed to 
establish, in the midst of their settlement, a central temple to 
which both Goths and Swedes owe one common religious allegi- 
ance. At first this central temple was at Sigtuna, on the eastern 
shore of the Miilaren ; afterwards it was removed to Upsala, where 
in splendour and magnificence it outrivalled every other temple 



202 National Life and Thought. 

north of the Baltic. On its ruins, speaking historically, towers, 
at the present day, the largest and stateliest cathedral in Scandi- 
navian Christendom. 

The earliest race of rulers that history mentions in Sweden were 
the Ynglingar, out of whom sprang the so-called overking or 
imperial head of the land. It followed, as a natural consequence 
of the close connection which in these early ages was supposed to 
exist between rulers and gods, that the chief king was also supreme 
pontiff at the same time. Ex-officio also, as it would seem, he 
was the president of the general assembly which met yearly at 
Upsala. 

But, as in all states struggling through the first stages of 
organisation, the power exercised by the supreme head is precarious, 
so the authority exercised by the royal primate of Sweden over 
the provincial tributaries, the so-called Folk-kings, depended 
entirely upon the effectiveness of the blows of his sword — on his 
personal ascendency and bravery in fact. Hence he had con- 
stantly to fight combinations among the Folk-kings, which aimed 
at transferring to some one among themselves the supreme power 
he wielded. Thus the earliest centuries of the history of Sweden 
present a picture of perpetual warfare and bloodshed, of one 
dynasty going down in blood and the next rising out of it to, in 
its turn, perish in the same way. The most famous of these inter- 
dynastic conflicts is the fight on the moor of Bravollr or Bravalla, 
as the Swedes pronounce the name, about 740, where the mighty 
warrior Harald Hilditonn, ancient and blind, fell at the hands of 
his nephew, Sigurd Ring, who thus became the founder of a new 
dynasty, which counted among its representatives the much- 
legended hero Ragnar Lodbrok and Bjorn Ironside, both con- 
querors by sea and land. During this dynasty great changes took 
place in Sweden. From within the mighty Viking upheaval begins 
to present to Eastern Europe a threatening front, 750-60. 
From without Sweden received in Ansgarius, 829, the first mes- 
senger proclaiming the principle of peace and goodwill among 
men — a principle which received a stubborn resistance, as might 
be expected, not only because of the tenacity with which the 
people clung to the faith of their forefathers, but especially on 
account of the Viking policy which at that very time had become 
a burning question in Scandinavia. By this policy murder and 
bloodshed were not only a lawful occupation, but constituted an 
indispensable title to consideration and advancement in society. 
Hence Christianity advanced in the North pretty much at the 



Sweden. 203 

same rate that its Viking energy spent itself. And in Sweden it 
was preached for nearly two hundred years, before the country had 
a Christian ruler in Olaf Skeetking, a.d. iooo. 

The Viking policy of Sweden deserves a moment's attention on 
account of the radical influence it brought to bear on the destinies 
of the Slavonic people of Eastern Europe. For West-European 
students of history the matter receives additional interest by the 
fact that the modern school of Russian historians is busily at work 
suppressing, as an idle fable, the story I am going to tell you. 
In the year 859 the earliest Russian historian, who goes under the 
name of Nestor, and was a monk from Kijef, who lived in the 
twelfth century, states that the Varegs or Warangians came over 
the sea and collected tribute from various Slavonic tribes in 
Russia. Three years afterwards they were driven out of Russia ; 
but on their departure there arose such an anarchy in the land, 
that the people agreed at last to send for a prince who should 
rule over them and protect them. And they went over the sea, 
says Nestor, to the Warangians, to the Rus, for so these Waran- 
gians were called, and set forth to them the anarchical state of 
their country. And three brothers, princes among Rus, went with 
all their followers. The oldest, Rurik, settled in Novgorod; 
another, Sineus, took up his residence in Belo-ozero ; the third, 
Truvor, established himself in Izborsk. These purely and 
exclusively Scandinavian names, which, in the vernacular, have the 
forms of Hrcerekr, Signjotr, and Thorvarr, 1 are in themselves 
evidence sure enough of the veracity of the chronicler, which also 
is borne out by many a corroborative evidence from other inde- 
pendent sources, such as Byzantine chroniclers, Frankish and 
Venetian annals, and even early Arabic writers, such as Ibn 
Dustha, Ibn Fadhlan, and others. 

We have already seen that these Scandinavians were called 
Rus by the first Russian chronicler. The Arabs call them by the 
same name, and the Byzantines invariably Rhos. No doubt the 
Arabs and the Greeks got the name from the Russian Slavs. 
They again had got it from their nearest northern neighbours the 
Fins, whose name for Sweden from time immemorial has been 
Ruotsi, which by natural phonetic law in Slavonic becomes Rus. 
The Finnish name is on all hands acknowledged to be of foreign, 
that is to say, Scandinavian origin. In the Middle Ages the 

' I think it is open to doubt whether this is the original of Truvor. I am 
more inclined to think that it was Thordr, pronounced by the Scandinavians, 
by means of Svarabhakti, somewhat like Turder = Slav-Truvor. 



204 National Life and Thought. 

inhabitants of Upland and East Gotland in Sweden were called 
the Rods-karlar or Rodsmsen, the rowing men, the oarsmen, or 
seafarers, and the first element of the compound might have been 
taken up by the Fins and given to the whole nation of Sweden, 
whom they practically knew as the rowing or seafaring nation. 
In any case, Riis was the name of Swedes among their eastern 
neighbours ; and from them, as founders and organisers of the 
Russian state, it passed into a name or title not only for that 
state, but also for all the nationalities composing it. Hence, his- 
torically traced, Russia means the Swedish Empire. For two hun- 
dred years, or to about 1054, these Scandinavians were alternately 
the terror or the mercantile customer of the Byzantians. There is 
something historically significant in the fact that the ferocious 
sway of the Scandinavian Vikings should come to an end both in 
the east and the west at almost the same time, in the course of 
the eleventh century. This is not the occasion for going into 
that interesting question; but I may briefly mention that the con- 
quest of the Holy Land by the Seldjukian Turks in the same 
century, and the incessant current of news to Western Europe by 
returning pilgrims of the brutal treatment of Christians by the 
new conquerors, created gradually a new idea, that of saving the 
Holy Land from the infidel barbarian, and provided for the mili- 
tary energy of Europe a new outlet in the Crusades, which after 
all are but the Viking movement in another form. 

While the Swedes thus became the founders and organisers of 
the Russian state, the nation at home was passing through gradual 
changes, constitutional as well as religious. By the opening of 
the eleventh century the country had a Christian ruler, as I said 
before, in the person of Olaf Skeetking. And now history 
exhibits to us for the first time a telling and interesting illustration 
of the constitutional condition of the country. In the various 
folklands different and peculiar codes of law had grown up, and 
the guardianship of the law was chiefly left to the so-called law- 
man, whose duty it was not only to instruct the people in the 
law, that is, to give out at the periodical folk-motes the law as it 
stood, but especially to guard the rights and privileges of the 
Franklins against infringement on the part of the king. A telling 
illustration of the vindication of this constitutional right is related 
as occurring in the reign of this king, all the more telling, because 
it is an evidence of the indomitable spirit of freedom which at all 
times, especially at the most serious, has found an exponent 
among the Franklin class of Sweden. The story tells how Olaf 



Sweden. 205 

Skeetking harboured an inveterate grudge towards King Olaf 
Haraldsson (Saint 01.) of Norway. The latter, in order to bring 
about friendship between the two countries, sued for the hand of 
the daughter of his Swedish namesake ; but though she tried with 
the aid of others to bend her father's temper towards acceptance of 
the suit, yet all her endeavours proved in vain. But the time of 
the general assembly of all the Swedes was at hand, and the 
mighty law-man of Tiundaland, Thorgny by name, was one of 
the self-chosen members of the assembly. Earl Rognvald, the 
ambassador from Norway, seized the opportunity of sounding the 
great spokesman of the Franklins with regard to Norway's suit. 
He came to Thorgny's home one day towards eve. The house 
was great and magnificent, and many people about, who took at 
once charge of the Earl's caravan, and gave him good cheer. 
The Earl entered the hall, which was crowded with the law-man's 
attendants. In the high seat there sat an old man, and a grander- 
looking magnate they had never set eye on before. The beard 
was so long that it covered the whole of his front and rested on 
his lap. And a goodly man he was, and noble to behold. 

One day Earl Rognvald told Thorgny his errand; that his 
master wanted to put a stop to a state of retaliatory raids over 
the boundaries of the two kingdoms, and in order to secure peace 
between them desired to obtain the hand of Ingigord, King Olaf 
the. Swede's daughter. " But I know not how to prevail," said 
the Earl, " on account of the Swede's implacable hatred towards 
Norway." Thorgny, after a pause, answered : " Your ways are 
strange. You hanker after titles; but if you encounter some diffi- 
culty, your counsel and forethought forsake you. ... I deem it 
no deprivation of dignity to belong to the Franklins, with full 
liberty of speech, so as to be free to utter one's own mind frankly 
even in the presence of the King. Now, I shall come to the Upsala 
Assembly, and you speak out there whatever seems good to you." 

At the Thing held in the open the King occupied a seat sur- 
rounded by his court. On the other side sat Thorgny with his 
house-carles, and Rognvald the Earl with his court. Behind 
Thorgny stood the crowd of Franklins, while others took up their 
station about hillocks and mounds to listen to the speakers. 
When the King had answered, by a most insolent speech, the 
Earl's errand of peace and wooing, Thorgny stood up, and with 
him all the Franklins who were seated before, rushing forward, 
crowding round their tried spokesman to hear what the grand 
old man had to say. And a great clashing of weapons was the 



206 National Life and Thought. 

cheer by which he was hailed. When silence prevailed, he said : 
" Very different is now the temper of the kings of Sweden to 
what it has been in bygone days. My grandfather, Thorgny, told 
me how he remembered King Erik, son of Emund, and how he, 
while he was yet in the free course of manly thew, went every 
summer out on warfare to various lands, and subdued Finland, 
Karelin, Esthonia, and Courland, besides other eastern dominions ; 
and still you may see standing the earthworks and other great 
fortifications which he made, yet was he not so haughty as not 
to listen to people who had important matters to bring to his 
notice. My father was for a long time with King Bjorn, whose 
dominion stood firm and fast through life, and he was easy and 
affable to his friends. I myself may well remember King Eirik 
the Victorious serving him, as I did, in many a war ; he increased 
the Swedish power and defended it with manly hardihood ; yet it 
was easy for us to bring him to listen to reasonable counsel. But 
this King whom we have now allows no one to be so bold as to 
talk to him aught but what may be pleasing to himself. In this 
he shows himself stubborn enough, but his tributary lands he 
allows to be lost by reason of his want of ability and lack of 
strength. He aspires to subdue Norway, which no King of 
Sweden before him set his mind on, whereby unrest and trouble 
is brought home to many a man. Now we, the Franklins, desire 
that thou, King Olaf, shouldst make peace with Olaf the Stout of 
Norway and give him in marriage your daughter Ingigord. So, 
too, if you are minded to reconquer those dominions in the 
Baltic which your predecessors and forefathers have had there, 
we will all follow you on such an errand. But if you will not 
consent to what we say, we shall set upon you and slay you, and 
suffer no disturbance and lawlessness at your hands. Such have 
been the ways of our forefathers. At the Assembly of Muli they 
plunged five kings into one ditch, who were swollen with pride 
and insolence against them, even as you are towards us. Make 
quickly up your mind as to what you mean to resolve." Then 
the people made great roar with clashing weapons, and His 
Majesty the Skeetking came promptly to terms with the 
Franklins. 

This digression is long, but it is a key to many a glorious 
chapter in the history of Sweden. It is the free Franklin class 
of that country which, at the most threatening periods in it 
history, has proved the unconquerable safeguard of its liberties 
against tyranny and lawlessness. 



Siveden. 207 

From the accession of Olaf the Skeetking, and for the next 
two hundred years, Sweden was the scene of internal and ruinous 
disunion, originating partly in the divergent religious tendencies 
of the two main races, the Gothic being the willing, the Swedish 
the unwilling and recalcitrating factor ; partly in the ambitious 
contention between the Swedish royal family of King Erik the 
holy, and that of the Gothic house of Sverkir. During these 
internal disruptions the chief sufferer was the class of the Frank- 
lins, out of whom there sprang a military aristocracy, boundlessly 
selfish and reckless of every other interest in the state but its 
own. It secured for itself at last full immunity from taxes, and 
from the common jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of justice. 
And after the elevation of Upsala to an archbishopric in 1163, 
whereby the hierarchy of Sweden obtained its own metropolis, 
these two principal parties in the state became on one side the 
undermining agents of the royal power, and on the other the 
oppressors of the people. As the military aristocracy in its time 
had arisen out of free Franklin class, so in time there arose, in 
their turn, out of the military aristocracy, certain mighty families, 
who divided practically all power in the state between themselves 
and the prelates. Of these families the mightiest in the thirteenth 
century was that of the Folkungs, who were Earls by dignity of 
birth. The most famous of the Folkungs was the Earl Birgir 
who in Swedish history figures as the reconstructor of law and 
right, and who with ruthless cruelty, even against his own kin, 
whom he destroyed in large numbers by treachery, combined the 
highest qualities of a patriotic ruler for his time, and brought 
the country to a height of prosperity which it had not known for 
generations before him. By abolishing the rights and dignities of 
Earls in Sweden, and lowering it to that of Dukes, he thought he 
should contribute an element of stability to the Crown. But he 
only introduced thereby a fresh danger. His eldest son, Walde- 
mar, t 1302, became King, his three younger sons Dukes; but 
they soon revolted against their weak and incapable brother, and 
from among them Magnus not only rose to the supreme power, 
but proved himself the ablest ruler Sweden had had for a long 
period. His historical surname, Barn-lock, is a fitting heading to 
the history of his reign. He was the Franklin's and farmer's 
especial protector, so that under his reign the robbing baron durst 
not even touch the farmer's property, though the barn had no 
other lock than that of the King's law. But with him the series 
of great Folkung rulers came to an end, and after sad and serious 



208 National Life and Thought. 

reverses the family died out with King Magnus II., Smek, 
who, after having wandered about for eleven years a dethroned 
monarch, was drowned in the Bay of Bergen in 1374. To him, 
however, the country owed the code of law which was first sanc- 
tioned in 1442, and remained the code of Sweden for 292 
years. 

His nephew and successor, Albrecht of Mecklenburg, was ex- 
pelled, after an inglorious and anarchical reign of twenty-five years, 
and Sweden became a member of the confederate kingdom of 
Scandinavia under the provisions of the union-treaty of Kalmar 
( I 397)- That union only brought Sweden trouble and disaster, 
and was at last blotted out by the fearful massacre of Stockholm 
by Christian II. of Denmark, in the blood of six hundred of 
some of the best men of Sweden. It was not, however, without 
benefit to the country eventually, because it brought to the fore in 
the persons of the great Stures a family that was to give to the 
country some of the most famous men of the world. Gustav 
Wasa was the first of these. After many miraculous escapes from 
the persecutors of Christian II. he succeeded, by the bravery 
of the Franklins of the province of the Dalarne, in driving out the 
Danes and making himself master of the situation at home, and 
securing his election to the throne in 1523. We should have to 
go far afield in history to find such a true father of his country as 
this wonderful man. By prudence and firmness he overcame all 
internal troubles, destroyed the power of the hierarchy, and 
established the Reformation, caused the Bible to be translated, 
checked the aristocracy, and linked it to the crown by judiciously 
according it a share in the spoils of the dissolved monasteries and 
other confiscated Church properties. He had to fight with 
rebellious subjects, and he conquered and won their loyalty. He 
fought the Hanseatic league, then in the prime of its commercial 
insolence ; he had to battle with Russia, and out of both struggles 
he came victorious. When he had ruled as elected king for 
twenty-one years, the Rigsdag of Wadstena made the succession 
hereditary in his family in both lines male and female. The pro- 
perty of the crown was largely increased, the exchequer enriched, 
the laws relating to taxes, customs, and duties were reformed, 
agriculture, mining, trade, and industry, not to speak of education 
and learning, were all fostered by the same fatherly hand, the 
same penetrating wisdom. And never had the people of Sweden 
before witnessed so great a work and so full of blessing done by 
any of its rulers as that left by this noblest of kings, when, after a 



Sweden, 209 

reign of forty-one glorious years, he left the throne to his unworthy 
son Erik XIV., who, as a madman, lost it eight years afterwards, 
and his life by poison in prison 1577. But the great qualities of 
the founder of this dynasty revived again in Charles IX. (1604- 
161 1), and especially in the most illustrious of his successors, 
Gustavus Adolphus II., who was as great a genius in the organisa- 
tion of the internal administration and in his legislative activity as 
he was on the field of battle. 

His military successes are matters with which the whole world 
is familiar. His premature death on the field of Liitzen cut short 
the many plans he had formed for the future, among which not 
the least eventful would have been that of creating a Protestant 
Scando-Baltic Empire under the regency of Sweden, as a counter- 
poise to the Catholic House of Hapsburg, a plan which it was 
reserved for the Great Brandenburgers of North Germany to take 
up a century later, in the person of Frederick the Great, to prac- 
tically accomplish, after the lapse of another century, on the field 
of Sadowa in 1866, and to give the final touch to by the collapse 
of the other great Catholic power on that of Sedan in 1870. 

In one respect the glorious reign of Gustavus Adolphus 
redounded to the misfortune of Sweden. The commanding 
character and personality of the King had prevailed with the 
aristocracy to lend him a self-sacrificing assistance in order to 
carry on his war in Germany. Thereby the aristocracy won, 
both at home as purchasers of state domains, and in the battle- 
field as plundering victors, an enormous ascendency, which still 
increased under the successors of Gustavus, Christina, and her 
cousin Charles X., and came to a disastrous culmination during 
the minority of the latter's son, Charles XI. For when, 
soon after his accession, 1672, he was engaged in war with 
Denmark and Brandenburg, the evils of the previous administra- 
tion were soon brought to light, and Sweden suffered one serious 
reverse after another. Having secured for himself almost absolute 
power by the consent of Parliament in 1680, and more 
especially in 1682, the gifted and energetic ruler made it his first 
business to deprive the aristocracy, which, by its selfishness, had 
all but ruined the country, of an immense amount of its property 
and of its more dangerous privileges. He left the state in every 
way in a thoroughly organised condition, 1697, to his son Charles 
XII., then fifteen years of age, after having four years previously, 
1693, received from his Parliament such absolute power as to be 
free to act independently of Parliament altogether, 

o 



210 National Life and Thought. 

At this moment the King of Sweden ruled, besides Sweden 
itself, over Finland, Esthonia, Livonia, Courland, Ingermanland ; 
further, Pomerania, Riigen, Bremen, Verden, and Wismar. The 
enormous sacrifices to which the wars of this extraordinary man 
put his country are probably unsurpassed in the military history 
of civilised states. In nine years the country, with a population 
of some 1,800,000 inhabitants, supplied its extremely obstinate 
young hero with no less than 400,000 soldiers ; and even after 
the disaster of Pattava, managed to put in the field a fresh con- 
tingent of 70,000 men well organised and well equipped. That 

to say, it placed in the field one-fourth of the whole population. 
But he left it also exhausted and powerless ; and worse than that, 
he had transferred from it the character of a great European 
power over to Russia, which, three years after the death of 
Charles, invaded Sweden, and in less than three months laid in 
ashes 5 towns, 1361 villages, 141 country seats, besides a large 
number of iron works and mines, and deprived Sweden, by the 
treaty of Nystad, 172 1, of all her Baltic possessions which had 
not already, the year before, passed into German hands. The 
consequences of the Charles's wars with regard to the internal 
condition of Sweden, were equally disastrous. The exhausted 
land, plunged in the depths of the extremest misery, had practi- 
cally fallen under the sway of the few nobles who had amassed 
fortunes out of its ruin. They soon made such a compact com- 
bination against the Crown, that they not only abolished the 
absolutism which Parliament had conferred on Charles XL, but, 
confident of their invincible power, brought hnmiliation on humil- 
iation on the sovereign, especially during the reign of the con- 
scientious, peace-loving, honest, but passive King Adolph 
Frederick, 1743-17 71. Immediately almost after the death of 
Charles XII., however, the nobles , began to contend among 
themselves for the lion's share of the spoils which the helpless 
state of the country held out to them. And eight years after his 
death (1726) their split was complete, and remained so for forty- 
six years. The two contending parties were called " Hats " and 
" Caps." The Hats were the military party, bent on the recovery 
of the military renown of Sweden and her prestige abroad. The 
Caps were in favour of developing generally the internal resources 
of the country. But what both had in common was an insatiable 
craving for all power in the state,, and at length so thoroughly 
sheared the Crown of her prerogatives, that the sovereign had no 
longer even the freedom to dispose of any state patronage.. ..So. 



Sweden. 2 1 1 

■unscrupulous were these factions, and so unpatriotic, that to oust 
each other out of favour at court, they took foreign bribes by 
turns, and naturally neglected entirely what was most necessary, 
namely, the internal organisation and the real welfare of the state. 
To this kind of anarchy Gustavus III. put an end by a coup 
d'etat in 1772, when, by the aid of his soldiers, he put the 
Council of State in prison, and forced the Rigsdag, surrounded 
by the military, to frame a constitution by which the executive 
power, the command of the army and navy, the state patronage, 
the creation of Peers, the right to enter and abandon alliances, 
to make treaties and defensive wars, was again vested in the 
Crown. But the brilliantly gifted monarch, the great patron of 
learning, and founder of the famous Academy of Sweden, was 
also a light-hearted, wasteful, and unscrupulous prince ; his war 
with Russia, 1788-90, brought Sweden only loss and no advan- 
tage. His hostile attitude towards the French republic and sub- 
mission to Russian influence cost him his life, 1792. Under his 
successors, the half-lunatic Gustavus IV., Adolph, who was de- 
posed by a military conspiracy, and Charles XIII., the misfortunes 
•of Sweden came to a final end by the loss of Finland in 1809, a 
Joss which the Swedish nation, in spite of sore regret, has wisely 
made up its mind never more to repair. It was recompensed to 
some extent by the acquisition of Norway under the treaty of 
Keil in 18 14, an arrangement which, in spite of a good deal of 
.friction, has proved on the whole beneficial. Since then Sweden 
has enjoyed a profound peace and made a magnificent use of 
her opportunity. Not the least important of the innumerable 
items of progress which during this period have ennobled and 
.adorned the national life of the Swedish people, are the consti- 
tutional laws of the country, namely, the Constitution proper of 
June 9, 1809; the Parliamentary regulation of February 10, 
1810, radically reformed in 1865, and sanctioned June 22, 1866 ; 
the Law of Succession, September 26, 1810 ; and the Free Press 
Regulation, July 16, 18 12. 

By these laws Sweden is a constitutional monarchy, hereditary 
in the male line only. The administrative power is vested in the 
King alone, while the legislative he shares with the representatives 
•of the nation forming the Parliament or Rigsdag. He can pro- 
pose measures, and has an absolute veto. He is irresponsible 
.and his person sacred, all responsibility resting on his ministers 
who form the council of state. He is commander-in-chief by sea 
.and land. He has a right to enter alliances and to make treaties 



212 National Life and Thought. 

with foreign powers. He can, having consulted the council of 
state, resolve on war and peace as he judges most profitable to 
the state, in which matter the councillors of state are responsible 
to the nation for their advice. The prerogative of supreme judge 
is transferred from him to a supreme court of judicature composed 
of twelve to eighteen judges. 

The Rigsdag is no longer, as in former times, composed of the 
four estates — the aristocracy, the clergy, the burgesses, and the 
farmers, but by elected deputies. It is divided into two cham- 
bers, called first and second chamber, both having equal authority 
in all legislative matters. Qualified for the first chamber is a 
person who has attained his thirty-fifth year, and has at least for 
three years previous to his election been in possession of assess- 
able real property to the value of 80,000 crowns (^4444), or on 
capital or labour has paid taxes to the state amounting at least 
to kr.4000 (^233). The members to the first chamber are- 
elected for nine years by the so-called "landsting," or provincial 
assemblies ; but in towns which are not represented in these 
assemblies, they are elected by special deputies. The population 
of each electorate for the upper chamber is fixed at 30,000. 

Qualified for the second chamber is every member of a com- 
mune having filled his twenty-fifth year, who has a domicile within 
it, and a vote in its general affairs, provided he has, either in town 
or country, assessable real property of at least the value of kr.iooo 
(^50), or farms for life, or at least for five years an agricultural 
estate of at least kr.6ooo assessable value, or pays voluntary 
tax on a yearly income of at least kr.8oo. These deputies are 
returned for three years, and are elected in rural districts by 
electors, each of whom represents 1000 of the population of the 
community, one for every jurisdiction, in the towns for every full 
10,000 of the inhabitants. When the population of a jurisdiction 
that returns one member numbers more than 40,000 inhabi- 
tants, it is divided into two electorates, and returns two members* 
Towns, whose populations do not amount to 10,000 inhabitants, 
are grouped into electoral combinations, each of which shall 
number not less than six, nor more than twelve thousand people,, 
returning one member. Members for the second chamber must 
have filled their twenty-fifth year, and have had the right of 
communal vote for one year at least, before their election to the 
Rigsdag. These deputies, in contrast to those of the upper 
chamber, are paid members of the diet, receiving kr.1200 for 
every session, and having their travelling expenses paid beside. 



Sweden. 213 

The diet, which meets ordinarily on the 15th of January, can- 
not, except at its own request, be dissolved till it has sat for four 
months, unless, during the session, the King dissolves for re-elec- 
tion one or both chambers. 

The King nominates the speaker and deputy-speaker of both 
houses. The standing committees of every ordinary Rigsdag 
are : The constitution committee (20), the state committee (20), 
the tax committee (20), each consisting of twenty members ; 
further, the bank committee and the law committee, each con- 
sisting of sixteen members. On all these committees both houses 
are equally represented. The ministers can, ex officio, without being 
members, attend and take part in the debates of both houses, but 
•.have no vote unless they happen to be members of the standing 
committees. Whatever measure both chambers pass by a 
majority becomes a resolution of the Rigsdag. Any measure 
failing to obtain a majority of votes in either chamber is thereby 
defeated, except such as relate to the budget, for which special 
regulations are provided. These are some of the most important 
provisions of the present Swedish constitution, which, unlike the 
paper constitutions of the continent, is, in common with that of 
England, one of traditional growth, an organic systematisation of 
the public life of the people, through which, at last, by heroic 
endurance and patient trust in their indomitable free heart, the 
no less gifted than noble-minded tillers of the soil of Sweden have 
won the day, practically for ever — a very proper reward to those 
who, through all the thunder-and- lightning period of Sweden's 
existence in Europe as a great power, had to maintain the show 
by the only thing which only too frequently was left them, their 
best and dearest blood. 

If an illustration were wanted to bring home the truism that 
peace is the greatest blessing that any nation can enjoy, let the 
history of the progress of Sweden in the nineteenth century be 
attentively studied. The population has already doubled itself. 
In 1800 it was 2,347,000; in 1885 it had risen to 4,682,000. Of 
this population just about one-half is engaged in agricultural pur- 
suits. The value of the proceeds of this industry, varying, of 
course, with varying seasons and harvests, amounts to between 
twenty and thirty millions sterling. From 1840 to 1880 the 
exports of cereals exceeded the imports to a considerable extent. 
But under the present protective system this has ceased to be the 
case. This protection, I should mention, only extends to cereals, 
■and is the result of the shortsighted policy of the Swedish agri- 



214 



National Life and TJwugJit. 



culturists, who command at present a preponderating influence in? 
Parliament. In other respects Sweden continues to be a free- 
trade state, a commercial policy which it adopted in 1854, and 
which since then has produced results which are likely to link the 
nation to that policy for ever. Thus the value of the manufac- 
tures of Sweden amounted in 1850 to two million pounds, but in 
1883 to more than ten and a half million. In 1850 the aggre- 
gate value of exports and imports was calculated at ^£4,000,000 ;. 
in 1884 it exceeded ^31,000,000. In 1850 the aggregate ton- 
nage of ships inward and outward bound amounted to 858,827 
tons, but in 1884 to 5,388,000. Such to Sweden have been the 
results of free trade. 

The mining industry of Sweden is in a state of constant and 
rapid progress. For a long time, and, in fact, till only very lately, 
its iron, on account of its good natural quality, has commanded 
the price of the European market, where even still it ranks high.. 
There are being worked at present more than 500 iron mines. 
In 1884 the aggregate produce amounted to over 900,000 tons,, 
while cast-iron stood at 416,958 tons, bar-iron at 267,534, and 
sheet at 66,329 tons. The copper mines at that time produced 
650 tons, those of silver 4000 lbs. troy weight. Pit coal has- 
as yet been found only in one province, Malmohu, but in such 
small quantity that the output of the mines only amounts to one- 
eighth of the coal imported from abroad. 

Railways have been in existence in Sweden for thirty-three 
years. In 1856 the first railway of twenty-one miles long, 
between Orebro and Nora was opened. In 1884 the total length 
of rail was 4194 miles, of which less than half belonged to the 
state, the rest to seventy-six private companies. At the same 
time the telegraphic lines extended to nearly 13,000 miles. 

With regard to the education of the nation, it is scarcely a 
moot point that the Swedes are the best educated nation in 
Europe. Primary education is not only compulsory but free, and 
has been so for a long time, for every Swedish child. The in- 
struction is conducted on a methodical system under government 
regulation. For the supply of primary education there were 
maintained, at the exclusive expense of the state, in 1884, no less 
than 9925 national schools, with 12,048 teachers male and female. 
In the larger parishes — some of which reach the size of many a 
German principality, and one, Gellivare in Lapland, is larger 
than the kingdom of Wurtemberg — the schools are organised on 
the ambulatory system, the teacher taking up his abode and set- 



Sweden. 215 

ting up his school at one farm after the other, according to the 
convenience of attendance for the children. For higher educa- 
tion there are provided 96 public schools, attended by 14,617 
pupils ; and two universities — one at Upsala, 1375, the other at 
Lund, in Schonen, erected 1668, for the wise purpose of welding 
to the Crown all the more firmly the newly-acquired southern 
provinces. The number of students at Upsala amounts to over 
1900, with a teaching staff of 58 professors and 61 docents. At 
Lund the attendance of students exceeds 800, and the teaching 
staff counts 86 persons. At both universities, which are largely 
endowed by the state, the teaching is conducted on the most 
advanced lines of scientific method. In fact, the Scandinavian 
universities altogether occupy a position in the very front rank 
among the universities of the world. 

Among the languages or dialects of Scandinavia the Swedish is. 
by a long way the most euphonious and pure-sounding, with a 
modulating intonation which gives it a peculiarly noble grace- 
It is from no chauvinism, therefore, that the Swedes are proud of 
their idiom and name it the metallic tongue. And even when 
one of their greatest poets calls it the language of honour and 
heroism, the poetical hyperbole does not far overshoot the mark. 
For if there is any lesson that the history of Sweden teaches us 
more than another, it is this, that the salient characteristics of 
the race are honour and heroism. 



XII. 

DENMARK AND ICELAND. 

EIRIKR MAGNUSSON, M.A. 

I SHALL, perhaps, best enable my audience to follow my 
remarks by at once giving a brief summary of the main 
points of my discourse. 

Rapidly surveying the history of Denmark, I propose to show 
how, by the inexorable law of readjustment which is inherent in 
every false position, and not by faults of statesmanship only, 
Denmark from a great power has come down to her present 
position. I shall show how, instead of resulting in ruin, the 
catastrophe of 1864 has proved a blessing to the long-tried and 
long-wronged nation ; how it was due to the troubles in the 
Duchies of Schleswick-Holstein, at least in part, that the absolute 
monarchy passed into a constitutional one in 1848 ; and, finally, 
how this constitution works, and how the constitutional principle 
has been applied with regard to Iceland. 

It is true that Denmark is a small kingdom, its territorial 
extent amounting to but 15,000 square miles, or one-half of 
Scotland, and naturally contributes but little to the political 
forces now at play on the other side of the North Sea ; but it 
is inhabited by a gifted and a brave race, and its history is full 
of interest to those who, animated by broad human sympathy, 
love to take a wide view of the changeful destinies of mankind. 

In the very dawn of Scandinavian history, the Dane rises out 
of the sea, as it were, with an art entirely unknown in Northern 
Europe — the art of naval warfare. After the sack of Lindisfarne 
in 793, Alcuin, the most accomplished scholar of the age, wrote, 
""Who ever heard of such a thing as war made by sea?" So 
•entirely at that time was the peace of the sea trusted in, that, 
both in Western Europe and in Great Britain, some of the 
wealthiest religious establishments were erected close to the shore, 
■or out on the islands around it, in order to be as far removed as 
.possible from the turmoil of robbing barons and plundering kings. 



2i8 National Life and Thought. 

From the beginning of the ninth century the sea became, as one- 
of their poets has expressed it, the Danes' path to power and 
glory. Every creek and bay and river bore their keels into the 
midst of some populous centre in the west of the old world. 
The Frank, the Gaul, the Spaniard, the Italian, the Moor — not 
to speak of the Anglo-Saxon in England, and the Celt in Ireland 
and Scotland — had to yield their blood and treasure to this ruth- 
less ruler of the sea, in ruinous plenty, for three hundred years. 
The memory of this reign of terror still lives vivid in every Danish 
breast, and has, unfortunately, always tended to infuse more or 
less inconsiderate brusqueness into their dealings with nationali- 
ties subject to their sway. This, however, is no peculiarity of 
the Danes ; it is the common malady of conquerors. 

The conquest of England and the reign of Canute the Great, 
who even added Norway to his empire, brought Denmark to such 
an height of power in Europe as it has never enjoyed since to the 
same extent. That reign may be regarded as the culmination of 
the Viking conquests, as the century following Canute's death 
may, in a measure, be considered the period of reaction after the 
long-sustained strain. During this century internal disorders, and 
consequent weakness of the crown, rendered the country an easy 
prey for the Slavonic populations, who were its nearest neighbours 
on the south of the Baltic. Internal order was first re-established 
under the able rule of Waldemar the Great (1157-82), who reta- 
liated handsomely on the Vends, seized the island of Rugen, and 
converted it, after the fashion of the time, to Christianity. The 
conquests of this monarch were extended by his son Canute VI. 
(1182-1202), not only to the Vends on the Continent, but also 
to the territories now called Mecklenburg and Pomerania; and 
his brother and successor, Valdemar the Victorious (1202-41), 
extended the sway of Denmark along the whole southern border 
of the Baltic, winding his victorious progress up with the con- 
quest of Esthonia in 12 19. Once more Denmark was a great 
power in Europe. But the fatal German axe was soon aloft 
again, and Denmark's ascendency came to a total collapse in 
1227, when, defeated in an expedition against a confederacy of 
North German magnates, Waldemar became a prisoner of the 
Count of Schwerin, and had to renounce all his Vendish and 
German conquests. Another century of disasters now opened, 
during which the selfish disloyalty of the aristocracy and the 
Church, together with German aggression, so completely beggared 
the crown that King Christopher II. (1319-33), in order to main- 



Denmark and Iceland. 2ig- 

tain himself at all against his many foes, had to mortgage nearly 
the whole of his kingdom, and after a disastrous fight with the 
Holsatian Count Gert, practically lost it to the Germans. During 
the anarchical period of eight years that followed his death in 
1333, even the old Danish provinces of Sconen, Holland, and 
Bleking in Southern Sweden passed under the crown of that 
country. 

But for the murder of Count Gert by the Danish nobleman,. 
Niels Ebbeson, 1340, Denmark would now have become a 
German state. So dark did the Danes regard this long period, 
that when once more there arose a sovereign of ability, in the 
person of Waldemar, the son of Christopher, who brought 
coherence to the state and security to the people, the nation 
conferred on him the suggestive title of " Day again." He recon- 
quered the Swedish provinces, occupied the island of Gothland,, 
and sacked the wealthy Hanseatic emporium of Wisby. A great 
drawback to his otherwise successful reign was the disastrous war 
which, for nine years towards its close, he waged with the 
Hanseatic towns, whose commercial power in the Baltic had been 
rapidly increasing ever since the close of the thirteenth century. 
Waldemar left his realm, however, in a fairly organised condition 
to his grandson Olaf, then only five years old. He was the son 
of King Hakon VI. of Norway and Waldemar's exceedingly able 
daughter, Margaret, the Semiramis of the North. Regent in 
Denmark for her young son from the death of her father in 1375, 
likewise in Norway on the death of her husband in 1380, Queen 
of both kingdoms on the death of her son in 1387, elected 
sovereign of Sweden in 1389 in recognition of the assistance she 
had afforded the Swedes in expelling the hated and despised King 
Albrecht of Mecklenburg, this mighty woman, by dint of personal 
ability and the fortune of circumstances, was the first person 
recorded by history as sole sovereign over the whole Scandinavian 
race. Her great idea was that this union should not only be one 
de facto, but should be secured by substantial guarantees, tending 
eventually to organic unity, an idea which, if her successors had 
possessed but a particle of her political sagacity, would probably 
have changed the history of Scandinavia, especially that of 
Denmark. She bestowed Schleswig on the Counts of Holstein as 
an hereditary feud 1386, thereby securing peace in that fatally 
dangerous corner. And in 1397 she brought about in Kalmar 
the Act of Union, the main stipulations of which provided that 
henceforward the three kingdoms should have one king; that he 



220 National Life and Thought. 

should be chosen by representatives from all three kingdoms ; 
that they should mutually assist each other against foreign foes ; 
that each kingdom should be governed by its own laws. This 
Union, though wisely conceived, never worked properly. Sove- 
reigns and people were alike immature for a political experiment 
•of so delicate a nature. National jealousies, aristocratic insolence, 
hierarchical contumacy, and royal caprice were the chief internal 
foes. The deathblow was given to it at last by that implacable 
enemy of the aristocracy and hierarchy, King Christian II., 
who, but for his ruthless cruelty, was one of the most able and 
truly patriotic kings that ever occupied the throne of Denmark. 
In the hope of rendering the Swedes more submissive to his 
relentless rule, he caused to be massacred, in Stockholm, on the 
8th of November 1520, two bishops and thirteen councillors of 
State, besides some six hundred citizens, and by this act broke off 
for ever the union of the two countries, after having lasted 
nominally on paper for 126 years. 

By the accession of the Oldenburg dynasty to the throne in the 
person of Christian the First (1448) there arose on Denmark's 
political horizon the ill-omened star which went down in the 
blood of Dubbel, 1864. With this German family German 
influence in Denmark took up its headquarters at court, and for 
more than three centuries pervaded the national life, the language, 
the laws, the literature of Denmark. There were able men among 
these Oldenburgers ; but unfortunately for a small country with a 
population within a million, trodden down by baron and prelate 
alike, and with an exchequer in constant straits, they were, most 
of them, far too recklessly warlike, and still more unfortunately so 
seldom had really solid victories to boast of. The worst legacy 
left them from previous reigns was the so-called "Haandfaestning" 
or capitulation, which at every successive election from that of 
Christopher II. in 1320, the barons and the prelates extorted from 
their unwilling sovereigns down to the middle of the seventh century. 
Every successive capitulation was more and more exacting, more 
and more destructive to the power of the crown. Out of this 
suicidal abuse grew eventually its very anti-climax, the absolute 
monarchy in 1660, when the aristocracy insolently refused all 
monetary assistance to the defence of the country, which the war 
of Frederick III. with Charles X. of Sweden had brought to the 
very verge of ruin. The Reformation had already broken the 
power of the unpatriotic hierarchy by sweeping out the bishops. 
Frederick III. therefore allied himself with the united estates of 



Denmark and Iceland. 221 

the Burgesses and the Protestant Clergy, who were burning with 
indignation at the ruinous selfishness of the barons, and succeeded 
not only in putting for ever an end to the disastrous capitulations, 
but also in securing an undisputed succession to his heirs, male 
and female, on the understanding that he should give the kingdom 
a constitution. Instead of that, however, he betrayed his allies ; 
and in the so-called Kongeloo or King's law of 1665 established 
absolute government in his realm, an act which remained in force 
till 1848. Much as this King thus had achieved for the stability 
of the crown, he lost, on the other hand, a great deal through his 
war with Charles X. of Sweden, which cost Denmark for ever her 
ancient possessions on the Swedish continent, the provinces of 
Sconen, Holland, and Bleking. 

A great credit is due to the Oldenburgers for having raised 
Denmark from an insignificant to an important naval power. 
Frederick II. (1559-88) was the real founder of the Danish navy,, 
and already in his reign it did good service in breaking down the 
commercial tyranny of the Hanseatic league. His successors one 
after the other bestowed on the navy all the attention the 
exhausted exchequer permitted. And it is with her naval arm 
that Denmark has achieved her most brilliant triumphs. Niels- 
Juel and Thordenskjold are naval heroes of world-wide fame. 
And the wonderful engagement off Heligoland in 1864, where 
three small Danish men-of-war engaged the combined squadrons 
of Austria and Prussia, which to save itself from utter disaster had 
to retire at last within the line of England's maritime jurisdiction, 
showed that Danish tars were still the true chips of the old 
Viking block. 

Not the least of Denmark's many misfortunes was the loss of 
her fleet to England in 1807, and the ruinous war in which she 
became then involved for nearly three years. The worst of that 
disaster was, that it was the result of shortsighted statemanship, 
of an utter want of insight in the European situation, and of true 
appreciation of the character of her friends. This event was 
really the climax of a policy which Denmark had followed for a. 
long time. The Danes have always, by natural instinct somehow, 
had strong leaning towards France. And, strange to say, the 
stronger the less France has done for them and the more they 
have suffered for their Gaulish affection. If Denmark had entered 
in 1807 the alliance proposed by England, how different would 
her position be to-day ! 

But there is another political friendship for which Denmark has 



222 National Life and Thought. 

suffered even more, and may perhaps suffer irreparably in the end. 
From the beginning of the eighteenth century (Frederick IV. 
1 699-1 7 30) Denmark had begun to cultivate closer relations with 
Russia through her naval ascendency in the Baltic. From that 
time the Muscovite has kept a close watch on Denmark. His 
influence in that country has been what it is everywhere where 
he comes in contact with superior civilisation, reactionary and 
repressive of freedom ; his policy treacherous. By way of illus- 
tration, let me mention, that after the death of the greatest 
statesman Denmark ever had, Bernstorf the Younger, in 1797, 
who had given full freedom to the press and introduced such 
reforms in the administration of the State as to bring it to a 
really nourishing condition, it was Russia's first care to interfere 
in the internal affairs of Denmark, to the extent of procuring 
the abrogation of the press law and to introduce the censure. 
Further, let me remark that when Denmark, on two occasions, 
had assisted Russia against Sweden, in 1788 and 1809, and 
Alexander I. had given Denmark a distinct pledge that, in con- 
sideration of her alliance on the latter occasion, he would make 
good to her the loss of her fleet, he not only did nothing of the 
kind; but in 1812, three years after the conclusion of the Finnish 
war, entered on negotiations with Bernadotte, the successor elect 
to the crown of Sweden, which had for object the alienation of 
Norway from Denmark, on condition that Sweden should act 
the part of an ally to Russia in case of need. In her greatest 
need, in fact, his Muscovitic majesty had made a miserable dupe 
of Denmark. You may gauge the ruin of the country with but 
1,000,000 inhabitants being burdened with a national debt of 
■over ^22,000,000, besides a debt of over ^16,000,000 sterling of 
unguaranteed note issue, with its fleet gone, with Norway torn 
away from it in 18 14 by Sweden, and Heligoland by England. 
The notepaper debt was cleared off by the drastically, simple 
process of State bankruptcy, which merely transferred the ruin 
from the treasury to the holders of the paper, a shift which had 
the most deplorable effect possible on the country's agriculture 
and commerce. This was the outcome of Denmark's infatuated 
policy in leaving her destinies in the hands of Russia and France. 
Still, the unfortunate kingdom was not out of her troubles yet. 
Its weakness meant a proportionate gain in strength to her arch- 
enemy Holstein. Throughout the whole history of Denmark from 
its first dawn all her troubles either rose directly from Holstein 
-(Schleswick-Holstein), or were aggravated by the action of those 



Denmark and Iceland. 223 

principalities. And now that she had paid the penalty of her warlike 
follies and fond confidence in fickle friends, she still had to count 
with her Dano-German Duchies. In the struggle which was now 
soon to commence, Denmark no doubt did not always act with 
unimpeachable wisdom and sagacity. She resorted at times to 
high-handed, at others to underhand dealings. But she had dire 
provocations to meet. It is perfectly unjust to lay at the door of 
Denmark the eventual loss of these duchies. It was bound to 
•come about sooner or later, no matter how justly, how considerately 
Denmark might have acted. Denmark was still in the false 
position in which fate had put her. The duchies were border 
lands where two nationalities met. On one side the German, with 
the immense sentimental Fatherland behind, believing in German- 
ismus as in God, in German civilisation as a sacred mission, as the 
salvation of the intellectual soul of the world ; on the other the 
Danish, downtrodden by its very rulers, with a civilisation which 
after all was chiefly borrowed from Germany, with precious little but 
a strongly Germanized language in the way of a Scandinavian back 
bone about it. It was inevitable, under such circumstances, that the 
Holsteiners, to whose dukes Schleswig had over and over again 
belonged as a royal feof, should wish to draw the bonds closer 
between the two duchies ; and, above all, that they would not 
stand any attempt at eradicating the German language out of that 
part of Schleswig where it had become the common speech of the 
people and driven Danish out of the field. On the other hand, it 
was not only natural ; it was the duty of Denmark to protect the 
Scandinavian nationality in Schleswick as best she could. She could 
not do it in any way without rousing the jealousy of the German 
neighbours who wanted to have the whole of Schleswick all to 
themselves. The more masterly Denmark had managed the 
matter, the more surely she would have exasperated the Germans. 
By the beginning" of this century about one-half of Schleswick was 
occupied by a German-speaking population. When Frederick VI. 
in 18 10 attempted to take measures for the purpose of arresting 
the forward march of German in the duchy, it was soon evident 
what the Germans meant, for the royal word remained a dead 
letter, so compact an opposition did it meet with from the German 
officials and the clergy. 

It is impossible for me to attempt in the brief space of an hour 
to unravel the tangled skein of the political conflict which 
eventually was settled by the sword in 1864. Only the principal 
events can be touched upon, and that but briefly. , 



224 National Life and Thought. 

The wave of revolutionary emotion which the July revolution 
raised in 1830 brought also about in Denmark a national upheaval 
which led to the first step towards a constitutional monarchy, by 
King Frederick VI. calling together into four separate consultative 
assemblies the four estates of aristocracy, clergy, burgesses, and 
farmers, 1834. At the same time, a common government was 
given to Schleswick-Holstein with common court of supreme 
judicature, which helped the Germanisation of Schleswick forward 
in a large measure. Christian VIII. (1839-48) pursued an exceed- 
ingly indulgent and conciliatory policy towards the duchies, 
appointing his own brother-in-law the Duke Frederick of Augus- 
tenburg as viceroy of the principalities. But this only left all the 
free play to German aspirations in Schleswick. And when his son 
Frederick VII. succeeded to the throne in 1848-63, the long 
meditated revolt broke out, and forthwith received military support 
from Germany. 

In this ominous state of affairs, which was seriously aggravated 
by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1848, the King, 
whose motto was, " The people's love my strength," resolved to 
give to the country the constitution which every one was clamour- 
ing for ; and on the 5th of June 1849 tne absolute monarchy came 
to an end, and Denmark entered upon constitutional paths. After 
three years the revolt in the duchies was quelled ; but instead of 
now seizing the opportunity of incorporating Schleswick for good 
and all, as was strongly urged by the Whole-state party in Den- 
mark, the King, yielding to German diplomacy, gave to the 
duchies in 1852 a constitution which practically amounted to 
Home Rule, leaving under imperial control foreign affairs, the 
army, the navy, the post office, and the national debt. These 
matters were to be dealt with by the Council of State, in which 
the duchies should be represented in the same proportion to their 
population as Denmark was to hers. Seeing, however, that the 
population of the duchies only amount to two- fifths of that of 
Denmark proper, and the duchies consequently were left in a 
perpetual minority, this arrangement was readily seized upon as 
ground for disaffection, the fire of which was assiduously fanned 
by the Holsatian and the German press especially on the sore 
point that the Danes, who had taken measures in 1850 for pro- 
tecting their language in Schleswick, were in fact suppressing the 
German. This, no doubt, was in a measure true. The Danish 
population was loyal, the German disloyal, in the disguise of 
enforced peace. The consequences must be obvious. 



Den mark and Iceland. 225 

In 1858 the imperial constitution was abrogated in the case of 
Holstein (and Lauenburg), and the draft of a new constitution 
was submitted to the representative assembly of the duchy. 
Instead of discussing this government bill, the assembly simply 
set up, as a counter proposal, a new constitution for the whole 
kingdom, demanding that the monarchy should consist of three 
parts, each on an equal footing with the other — Denmark proper, 
Schleswick, and Holstein-Lauenburg. The proposal was probably 
never meant but as an affront, nor was it taken seriously by Den- 
mark. Long-continued negotiations, in which England endea- 
voured to act the part of a mediator, led to no result ; and at 
last, tired of the ineffective strife, the King of Denmark, without 
further negotiations, incorporated Schleswick in the Danish mon- 
archy by a proclamation of 30th March 1863, excluding Holstein 
and Lauenburg. This step introduced the last act of the drama. 
The King was called upon by the Federal Diet of Frankfurt to 
rrescind his proclamation. Germany was convulsed by patriotic 
indignation, and the political outlook grew most threatening. 
Denmark was inexorable ; an execution was threatened ; and as 
Denmark did not yield, was carried out in Lauenburg and Hol- 
stein. Thus matters stood when the last of the Oldenburgers, 
King Frederick VTL, died on 15th November 1863. 

King Christian IX. now ascended the throne, in conformity 
with the provisions of the London Protocol of 1852, which not 
■ only settled the question of the Danish succession, but practically 
bound the signatory powers to guarantee the integrity of the king- 
dom. The German powers, so far from acknowledging any such 
duty, disputed, on the contrary, the King's right to the crown — a 
dispute which, however, never went beyond a mere utterance of 
opinion. These were sad times indeed for Denmark and the royal 
house. Holstein was once more in revolt, supported by an army 
of execution from the German "Bund." Alone, and abandoned 
by the guarantors of her integrity, Denmark had now to face the 
overwhelming forces of Austria and Prussia combined, who soon 
overran the whole of Jutland ; and, after the storming of the forts 
of Dubbel, where the Danes fought with dauntless valour (April 
18, 1864), and the surprise of the fortified position of Alsen, 
there was no choice left to the exhausted land but to sue for 
peace. By the Treaty of Wiesma (October 30), Denmark had 
to sign away not only the German territories of Holstein and 
Lauenburg, but also the old Scandinavian territory of Schleswick, 
.with half its population purely Danish-speaking. The provision 

p 



226 National Life and Thought. 

of section 5 of the Treaty of Prague (1866), providing for the- 
restoration of the purely Danish northern part of Schleswick, is- 
now a dead letter since 1878, when Austria gave her consent to 
its abrogation. 

Thus the last and the bitterest cup of Denmark's misfortunes 
was drained. But the false position into which she had been 
placed as a borderland ruling over a population of an alien and a 
mighty race was rectified, and the real cause of all her most serious 
troubles was removed, an incurable state disease, in fact, had 
been cured by amputation. Was the sacrifice worth the cure ? I 
think there are overwhelming reasons for an affirmative answer to 
that question. It is but natural that the Danes should find it 
hard to persuade themselves that the greatest wrong inflicted upon 
them by the ruthlessness of brute force could be anything but an 
unmitigated evil. Even their Scandinavian brethren on the other 
side of the sound, at least, take the loss of Schleswick so seriously, 
that there can never, they maintain, until Schleswick or North 
Schleswick at least, is restored to Denmark, be a question of an 
alliance of Sweden-Norway with Germany. With these national 
susceptibilities it is easy to sympathise; but I think any one who 
has taken the trouble of attentively following the history of the 
relation of Denmark to the duchies, any one who knows what the 
Germanistic propaganda means, especially under the new conditions 
of that empire, if he is a well-wisher of Denmark, and capable of 
taking a dispassionate view of a political situation, must hope and 
trust that Denmark may never again have anything to do with 
Schleswick. At present the Danes set their heart the more fondly 
on the recovery of the duchy because they are firmly convinced 
that the Czar of Russia is going to set the matter right, and on 
that very ground he enjoys greater popularity in Denmark than 
even the King himself. Imagine the Czar of Russia compelling 
the German Empire to give up Schleswick to Denmark. What 
would that mean ? Why this, that on the first opportunity given 
or taken, the Germans would pick a quarrel with Denmark, and 
make her pay the penalty of her simplicity on their own terms. 
Let Denmark fence about and ward the Scandinavian nationality 
in what is left to her of Jutland with all means in her power, but 
to return to the course of her old quarrels with Teutonic aggression 
and Germanistic aspirations is as impolitic a thing as could well 
be conceived. In this respect, too, we must not forget that the 
cause of Denmark is the cause of Scandinavia. The strong feeling 
that animates all Scandinavians is the feeling of solidarity of race- 



Denmark and Iceland. 227' 

The fear of the danger of Denmark's absorption in the mighty 
Teutonic Empire is no idle hallucination. That event, unless the 
Scandinavians, the Danes especially, are carefully, wisely, coolly 
on their guard, may at any time come within the reach of practical 
politics. The surest way of avoiding it is to keep clear, as long as 
possible, of political entanglement in Schleswick. My advice is, no 
doubt, unpalatable to my Danish kinsmen, but it does not follow 
therefore that it is not politically wholesome. 

A glance at the material state of Denmark now, as compared 
with what it has been even at the most favourable times in her 
past history, so far as comparison is possible, soon convinces us 
that the country has never been in such a state of sure and solid 
progress, never so prosperous before. Naturally, for the people 
and the government can now give their undivided attention to the 
great material interests and natural resources of the land. The 
finances of the kingdom are in an exceedingly sound condition, 
and are managed with ability and thrift. Not only does the 
annual budget cover current expenses, but leaves considerable 
surplus for the redemption of the national debt which, though 
heavy, 170 millions = 9^ stlg., seems to sit very lightly on the tax- 
payer. The yearly income of the State amounts to about fifty- 
six million crowns, the yearly expenditure to fifty-three millions. 

Denmark being, in the main, an agricultural country, agriculture, 
stockrearing, and farm produce may be said to be the main springs 
from which the wealth of the country flows. Nearly one-half of 
the population is engaged in these trades ; and the progress they 
have made during the last quarter of a century, both as regards 
improved methods and as to the gross turn-out of the products, 
reflects the highest credit on the Danish agriculturist. With great 
energy and determination fenlands, moors, lakes, and shallow 
inlets of the sea have been reclaimed for agricultural purposes all 
over the land. Three-fourths of the whole area of the land is 
now under tillage, and of that area over thirty per cent, has been 
properly drained, chiefly of late years. The yearly value of the 
cereal produce (oats, barley, rye, wheat) is estimated at from 
180 to 190 million crowns; and the whole ground produce, 
including hay, root-crops, etc., is estimated at 300 millions. Of 
the cereal produce, the surplus exported abroad amounts in value 
to thirty-three millions (nearly ^£2, 000,000). 

In proportion to the population Denmark rears a larger stock 
of farm animals than any other country in Europe. In 1876 
there were no less than 350,000 horses in the country, nearly 



228 National Life and Thought. 

1,350,000 cattle, 1,719,000 sheep, and over 500,000 hogs. And 
up to that year the three last-named classes of animals had been 
steadily increasing in number for some time. Along with this 
increasing prosperity goes a constantly improving husbandry and 
improved methods in the preparation of dairy produce. Thus 
Danish butter commands now the highest price in the English 
market of all foreign butter, and in that market alone Denmark 
disposes of this one article of a quantity amounting in value to 
one-and-a-half million sterling. Altogether, the export trade in 
live animals and dairy produce is estimated at about four million 
sterling. 

Recognising the necessity of Denmark becoming a self-support- 
ing country in timber, instead of importing that article, as at 
present, to the amount of three-fifths of a million sterling yearly, 
a powerful association, the so-called Moor Society, has been in 
existence for some time, which works energetically at extending 
timber culture in the country, especially throughout the wild 
moors of Jutland. This Society has done an immense service to 
the country by scientifically exploring the soil of these barren 
wildernesses, and practically solving the question how they may 
be reclaimed both for cereal and forest culture. 

The Government, being keenly alive to the importance of the 
agricultural interest for the welfare of the country, show a praise- 
worthy liberality in supporting at the expense of the State a 
High School for scientific, veterinary, and agricultural instruction, 
which has had a most beneficial influence on the education of the 
Danish farmer. Great encouragement is also given by the Royal 
Agricultural Society, which has large means at its disposal, and 
dispenses them freely, both in travelling, pensions, and otherwise. 

In the industrial and manufacturing lines Denmark has 
not progressed at the same rate it has done in the 
agricultural business, the reason being want of the requisite 
capital. But everything tends to progress even in these pursuits 
also. The distillation of spirits, the brewing of beer, of which the 
country exports large quantities to India, China, Australia, and 
South America, and the manufacture of sugar, are all vigorously 
progressive industries. Still more so is shipbuilding and iron- 
smelting. Denmark's china is noted for excellency of quality and 
tastefulness of design, and the art-furniture of Copenhagen enjoys 
a special reputation in foreign markets. In fact, in art industry 
Denmark not only leaves the other Scandinavian countries far 
behind, but competes more and more successfully with foreign 



Denmark and Iceland. 229 

countries. Throughout the country great interest is taken in 
developing the artistic talents of the people, one of the principal 
things taught in Sunday schools being drawing. 

The foreign commerce of the country has also developed of late 
years very rapidly. The. total average value of exports and imports 
is calculated at 400 million crowns (over ^2 2,000,000). The 
mercantile fleet numbers about 3000 sailing vessels, and nearly 
200 steamers, with a total displacement of over 250,000 tons. 
The coasts are well lighted by seventy lighthouses, and the more 
dangerous waters with eight lightships. 

Railway and telegraphic communication is in a state of constant 
improvement. From twenty miles of rail in 1847 the length has 
now considerably exceeded 6000 English miles. Where practic- 
able the islands have been joined by railway bridges ; and Jutland 
has now, besides a main line running through the whole length of 
the country, several other parallel bylines, besides cross-country 
lines, uniting the more populous centres with the main artery of its 
traffic. Some of the lines have been built by private enterprise, 
but by far the greater part by State support. I believe they are 
all paying lines, the lowest rate of dividend being about 2\ per 
cent. The total capital invested in Danish railways amounts to 
over ^£7, 000,000. With the extension of the railways has gone 
that of the telegraphic communication, the improvement of which 
is being steadily attended to with great zeal. At present the 
length of telegraphic wire amounts altogether to between eight 
and nine thousand miles. 

But I must pass on from Denmark's material progress, of which 
my sketch does not form anything like even a satisfactory outline ; 
and, I am sorry to say, I must altogether pass by the literary and 
scientific position of the country, on which, by predilection, I 
should have liked to dwell, not only because I myself owe a good 
deal to Denmark in that line, but because there is so much in the 
whole educational system of Denmark that is well worthy of 
notice, and because she is producing so fast men of overtowering 
eminence in their respective and particular lines. 

From these pleasant considerations we pass over to the one 
great failure of the country — its present politics. 

I mentioned before that Denmark became a constitutional 
monarchy in 1849. 

The principal provisions of the Constitution are these : Every 
king of Denmark, before he can assume the government of the 
monarchy, must deliver a written oath that he will observe the 



230 National Life and Thought. 

constitution. He alone is invested with the executive power, but 
the legislative he exercises conjointly with the Assembly (Rigsdag). 
He can declare war and make peace, enter and renounce alliances. 
But he cannot, without the consent of the Assembly, sign away 
any of the possessions of the kingdom or encumber it with any 
State obligations. Laws and royal resolutions are so far binding 
that they be signed by the king and the Cabinet minister to whose 
portfolio they belong. The king's person is sacred and inviolable ; 
he is exempt from all responsibility. The ministers form the 
'Council of State, of which the king is the president, and where, by 
right, the heir-apparent has a seat. The king has an absolute veto. 

The Rigsdag (Assembly) meets every year, and cannot be 
prorogued till the session has lasted for two months at least. It 
consists of two Chambers — the Upper Chamber, " Landsting," and 
the Lower Chamber, " Folketing." The Upper Chamber consists of 
sixty-six members, twelve of which are Crown-elects for life, seven 
chosen by Copenhagen, and one by the so-called Lagting of Faro. 
The forty-six remaining members are voted in by ten electoral 
districts, each of which comprises from one to three Amts, or rural 
governorships, with the towns situated within each of them in- 
cluded. The elections are arranged on the proportional or 
minority system. In Copenhagen and in the other towns one 
moiety of electors is chosen out of those who possess the franchise 
for the Lower House, the other moiety is selected from among 
those who pay the highest municipal rates. In every rural 
commune one elector is chosen by all the enfranchised members 
of the community. And the election of the representative of the 
Landsting is thereupon transacted by the electors of the rural 
communes conjointly with the highest-rated members of the 
electoral district, as many in number as there are communes 
within the electoral Landsting's circle. The town electors bear the 
proportion of one to four to the electors of the communes (chosen 
and highest rated). 

The Lower House is elected for three years, and consists of 
102 members; consequently there are 102 electorates or electoral 
districts. According to the Constitution, every electoral district 
should number about 16,000 inhabitants. As no revision of the 
electoral districts has been undertaken since the constitutional 
charter was given in 1849, many and very considerable alterations 
have now taken place in respect of the population of the primitive 
electorates — some having now doubled, others even quadrupled, 
their population, as compared with 1849. If therefore a revision 



Denmark and Iceland. 231 

■of the electorate were undertaken now, the Lower House would 
be increased by between twenty and thirty members. The Lower 
House is elected by manhood suffrage. Every man thirty years 
■old has a vote, provided there be no stain on his character, and 
that he possesses the birthright of a citizen within his district, and 
has been domiciled for a year within it before exercising his right 
■of voting, and does not stand in such a subordinate relation of 
service to private persons as not to have a home of his own. If 
he has received poor-rate support, he must have repaid it, or been 
excused the repayment. 

The two Chambers of the Rigsdag stand, as legislative bodies, 
■on an equal footing, both having the right to propose and to alter 
laws. Should the two Houses disagree, a committee elected by 
both, and consisting of an equal number of members from each, 
has to endeavour to settle the matter in dispute. The ordinary, 
as well as the extraordinary, budget must first be laid before the 
Folkething ; and to that House exclusively belongs the right of 
impeaching Ministers. No tax can be levied, raised, or lowered, 
no State loan be negotiated, no domains be sold, without the 
authorisation of the Rigsdag. No taxes can be collected till the 
budget is voted. 

At present this very Liberal Constitution is not working 
smoothly. As was to be expected, two parties have gradually 
come into existence — a Conservative and a Liberal, or, as they 
are termed after French fashion, the Right and the Left. The 
country is governed at present arbitrarily against an opposition 
in overwhelming majority in the Lower House. The dispute 
between the Left and the Ministry does not really turn so much 
upon conflicting views with regard to great public interests, as 
upon the question whether Denmark has, or has not, to have 
parliamentary government. There are, however, vital questions 
— fiscal, agrarian, and military — in dispute into which time will 
not permit me to go. But the one great central question is 
parliamentary government. The Right represents chiefly the 
educated and the wealthy classes ; the Left the mass of the people, 
and is looked down upon by the Right. The standing objection 
on the part of the Right to admitting the Left to the government 
of the country has been hitherto that that party had no men 
capable of undertaking the government. This has always seemed 
to me to be the very reason why the Right should give way to 
constitutional exigencies, rather than to carry matters on to the 
legislative deadlock which at present is the order of the day in 



232 National Life and 7 liought. 

Denmark. Surely, for a Ministry in such a minority that the 
Opposition ean stop all legislative work, it is the wisest thing 
possible to do to let an incapable party come into power, and by 
its own incapability destroy its credit with the nation. Surely 
the tenure of office by such a party could only be brief, and come 
Speedily to an ignominious end, with the result that the nation 
would transfer its suffrages to the Right. But of such a solution- 
there seems to be no prospect at present ; and now the Right 
lives in high hope that the forthcoming elections in January may 
turn the scale in some manner at least in their favour, because 
the Left party for the time being is divided in itself. 

The technical reason why the parliamentary principle has not 
yet won the day, lies in the fact that by the charter both 
chambers, as constitutional factors, are placed on an equal 
fooling. 'This, the Government maintain, makes it lawful for 
the King to govern the country irrespective of the state of parties 
in the Lower House as long as his ministry has a majority in the 
Upper Chamber. This state of things has led to very unfortunate 
results, the worst of which is, that the charter of the Constitution 
has been unscrupulously set aside, and for the last four years 
the taxes of the country haw been collected under a provisory 
budget, which in no case has been sanctioned afterwards by the 
Assembly. De facto therefore, Denmark is at present governed 
on the lines of ministerial absolutism, or, which comes to the 
same thing, by absolutism pure and simple. 

In view of the general European situation, I regard it as the 
supreme duty of the present ministry of Denmark to lose no 
time in setting their house in proper constitutional order. And 
seeing that the only possible way of doing it is to resort to the 
method of parliamentary government, for which really the whole 
nation is clamouring, the sooner that method is adopted the 
better it will be lor Denmark. Then, first, such a legislative 
dead lock as that now existing would be an impossibility. There 
is nothing so dangerous in the government of States as for the 
two opposing parties to persevere in the course of mutual exas- 
peration until passion becomes the primary, patriotism the 
secondary consideration. Denmark has plenty of men among 
the Opposition able enough and patriotic enough to take the 
Government worthily in hand. The experiment should be tried 
while peace still prevails ; the excitement of wars and rumours 
of wars should not be waited for; for then the sufferer would be 
not so much the copper-headed ministry as the Young Dynasty 



Denmark and Iceland. 233 

I said in the beginning that I would tell you how the con- 
stitutional principle has been applied to Iceland. I have only 
time briefly to touch upon that matter. In 1800 the old Althing 
. (All Men's Assembly, General Diet), which had existed from 930, 
came to an end. Forty-five years later it was re-established by 
King Christian VIII. in the character of a consultative assembly. 
At that time the constitutional question in Denmark had been 
under consideration for ten years, and had found its first practical 
expression in the estates' assemblies of 1834, which I have 
mentioned already. The Althing at once began to direct its 
attention to the question — What Iceland's proper position should 
be in the Danish monarchy when eventually its anticipated 
constitution should be carried out. The country had always 
been governed by its special laws ; it had a code of laws of its 
own, and it had never been ruled, in administrative sense, as a 
province of Denmark. Every successive king had, on his acces- 
sion to the throne, issued a proclamation guaranteeing to Iceland 
due observance of the country's laws and traditional privileges. 
Hence it was found entirely impracticable to include Iceland 
under the provisions of the charter for Denmark ; and a royal 
rescript of September 23, 1848, announced that with regard to 
Iceland no measures for settling the constitutional relation of 
that part of the monarchy would be adopted until a constitutive 
assembly in the country itself "had been heard" on the subject. 

Unfortunately, the revolt of the duchies intervened between 
this declaration and the date of the constitutive assembly which 
was fixed for 185 1. The Government took fright, being unfortun- 
ately quite in the dark about the real state of public opinion in 
the distant dependency, 1200 miles away in the North Atlantic, 
and imagined that there something was brewing similar to what 
was going on in the duchies. This fear had for a long time a 
very unfortunate effect upon the progress of the negotiations 
between Iceland and Denmark. The Icelandic population was 
then, as it is still to-day, so thoroughly loyal to the Royal House, 
that State-dissolving aims, as the Government would persist in 
defining its fidelity to its own national institutions, never had 
entered their heads. The Icelanders only wanted to abide by 
their laws, and to have the management of their own home affairs, 
but the so-called National-Liberal Government wanted to incor- 
porate the country as a province in the kingdom of Denmark 
proper. This idea the Icelanders really never could understand 
as seriously meant. How was an island 1200 miles away to be 



234 National Life and Thought. 

really governed as an incorporated province, and for what purpose? 
This the Government never explained, and all the more suspicious 
grew the Icelanders, who soon saw that it must mean for themselves 
the abrogation of all the traditional privileges of the country. 
Thus their opposition to the idea became one which numbered 
every soul in the country except a few crown officials of the 
highest class who had not the courage of their own opinions. 
The constitutive assembly was brusquely dissolved by the Royal 
Commissary when he saw that it meant to insist on autonomy for 
the Icelanders in their own home affairs. And from 185 1 to 1874 
every successive Althing (but one) persisted in calling on the 
Government to fulfil the royal promise of 1848. It was no doubt 
due to the very loyal, quiet, and able manner in which the 
Icelanders pursued their case, under the leadership of the trusted 
patriot, Jon Sigurdsson, that in 1874 the Government at last 
agreed to give Iceland the constitution it demanded. But instead 
of frankly meeting the Icelandic demands in full, they were only 
partially complied with, and from the first the charter met with 
but scanty popularity. The main fault of it is found to be, that 
the seat of the Government is left at Copenhagen, and, conse- 
quently, the administrative action is so seriously lamed on account 
of the scanty communication. For some time- the successive 
Althings have been busying themselves with revising the charter 
of the Constitution, but so far their labours have been futile, 
because the so-called Upper House, composed of six crown nominees 
and six national deputies, mostly manages to "put the constitution 
to sleep," as the parliamentary phrase goes in Iceland. But there 
is no ill-feeling towards Denmark on the part of the Icelanders on 
this score. Nor has there really ever been any such feeling in 
Iceland. The people always draw a distinct line between the 
Danish Government and the Danish Nation, with which they 
always feel sympathetically akin, whatever their feelings towards 
the Government may be. Hence there is no such thing in 
Iceland as a race antipathy against the Danes. But it is often 
felt that on their part the feeling is not reciprocated, no doubt 
because they regard themselves as the ruling race. 

There is, however, just now a growing feeling in Iceland that 
the Government of Denmark is bent upon making the constitution 
as ineffective as possible. This feeling, unfortunately, has been 
seriously roused within the last few years, in consequence of a 
very unfortunate financial scheme having been launched by the 
minister for Iceland upon the financially utterly ignorant com- 



Denmark and Iceland. 235 

munity in 1885, by which a so-called "Land's Bunk" was set up 
for the country, for the purpose of "facilitating monetary 
intercourse in the land and of promoting its industries." For this 
purpose the minister for Iceland, advised by the directors of the 
National Bank of Copenhagen, issued in 1886 half a million of 
inconvertible, unguaranteed treasury notes, ranging in nominal 
value from five to fifty crowns. This paper was, by the Bank Law 
of September 18, 1885, made legal tender in the country. 
Lawfully it could only circulate in the county itself. But that 
principle has been disregarded by the administration who have 
allowed people to depose the paper in the Danish Post Office 
at Reykjavik against orders on the Danish Treasury which, of 
course, have been paid out in good Danish currency of the realm. 
By this manipulation all the treasury paper that has passed into the 
Post Office has naturally ceased to be legal tender, and has become 
valueless, having been taken beyond the boundaries of its 
circulation and negotiated in a foreign market, where it has no 
value. To recoup itself, the treasury of Denmark has made the 
Icelandic exchequer redeem its absolutely worthless notes in gold, 
the consequence of which is that on every Post Office Order the 
Icelandic treasury loses exactly 100 per cent. In this manner 
the poor country has lost already in less than four years nearly a 
millions crown (between ,£50,000 and ^60,000). The affair is 
creating a great sensation in the country, and an exceedingly bitter 
feeling against the Government, who, though they are well aware of 
the iniquity of the transaction, silently persist in their mad career. 



XIII. 
LESSONS FROM THE DUTCH REPUBLIC. 

PROFESSOR J. E. THOROLD ROGERS. 

AS men become civilised, and as they become acquainted 
with the history of their own and of other countries, the 
habit of association grows upon them ; that is to say, they are 
anxious to see, or, if they cannot see, to read accurately of those 
parts of the world in which great events have happened, and in 
which gr/eat deliverances have been wrought. 

I should not think much of a man who, knowing at all the 
facts of the case, gazed without emotion on the Pass of Ther- 
mopylae or the field of Marathon, where, at critical periods of 
the world's history, the march of Asiastic despotism was arrested 
by the valour of a small State, not so big as some of our English 
counties. Everybody knows the feelings of interest — I might 
even say of affection— with which persons representing every 
variety of religious thought, and some of them unassociated with 
any form of religious belief whatever, visit and look over those 
sites in Palestine, which are hallowed to memory as the scene, 
as I think, of the greatest deliverance that ever happened to the 
human race, because, at any rate, whatever else we may admit 
about Christianity, it declares unfalteringly and unansweringly the 
doctrine of the natural equality of man. 

And in the same way there is a small, storm-vexed part of 
Europe, rescued with difficulty from the sea, and preserved from 
the incursions of the ocean by zealous care and anxiety, in which 
one of the greatest deliverances that modern Europe has ever 
witnessed, or ever been interested in, was waged through a war 
which lasted for close upon forty years. This is the country of 
which I am going to say a little to you to-night — the country of 
Holland; and if there are places in Greece which could be 
named, if there are places in Palestine which could be recounted, 
which fill one with sympathy and that kind of faint, but, at the 
same time, real feeling of wonder and thankfulness, so I have 



238 National Life and Thought. 

always looked upon the Binnenhof at the Hague as one of the 
holiest spots in modern Europe, because there the great deliver- 
ance was planned, and there it was successfully carried out. 

Now, before the struggle in Holland, of which I shall have to 
say a few words, there were attempts made with more or less- 
success to shake off the yoke of the aristocracy of idlers and 
murderers, and to put in their place a body of men united in 
a common purpose indeed, but who also knew that the con- 
ditions of human life were labour. The Swiss, as early as 1307, 
at the battles of Sempach and Morgarten, gave a taste of their 
quality to the chivalry of Austria ; and let me tell you that in 
my conviction, who have studied, perhaps, more deeply than 
any living Englishman the doings of the chevaliers, that they 
were the most portentous of shams. The Swiss vindicated their 
independence, and, with one short interval, have preserved that 
independence from the days in which they met the armed knights 
of the Duke of Austria to our own time. 

There was a similar struggle carried on in England a little over 
five centuries ago. It has been my advantage to be able to point 
out to this audience — and you know that most English historians 
are excellent compilers of other people's knowledge — to point out 
to writers of history what was the real meaning of that struggle, 
which' came apparently to a sudden and tragical conclusion, not 
a mile from the place in which we are. I refer to the so-called 
insurrection of Wat Tyler. The insurrection of Wat Tyler was a 
determination on the part of the whole industrial population in 
this country, from Scarborough in the north, to Southampton in 
the south, and throughout the whole of the eastern counties 
(where alone, at that time, textile industries were carried on), to 
resist the encroachments of the feudal aristocracy. It is true that 
the multitude who rose against the landowners were cajoled ; it is 
true that the leader of the insurrection was murdered by an 
eminent supporter of law and order, the Lord Mayor of the time. 
But the efforts of the insurgents were successful. Never after- 
wards did the great landowners in the country try to constrain 
either the peasant or artisan to forced labour, till such time as 
the fruits of the victory having passed away from memory, a 
conspiracy between the king and his nobles led again to the 
enslavement of the English working man. 

And, just in the same Way, there was an uprising — and the 
echoes of it are still in our ears — in Bohemia, when John Ziska 
led the peasants against the columns of an arrogant, and appar- 



Lessons from the Dutch Republic. 239 

ently overwhelming aristocracy, and for more than two cen- 
turies his descendants — his representatives in political union — 
held sway there. 

Similarly in Flanders, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
the industrial population was so determined to resist the pre- 
tensions of the Roman Church — with what was associated with it, 
the authority of monarchs, and of aristocrats, as long as they 
remained in allegiance to the Roman Church — that the particular 
industry which characterised what is now called Belgium, that of 
the weaver, was taken as synonymous with a heretic. But 
although a weaver was always a heretic, our monarchs in England 
were exceedingly anxious to naturalise the arts of the weaver 
amongst us, so as to turn to account that produce for which 
England was famous in the Middle Ages, the wool of the country, 
and being occasionally disposed to be rather indifferent to the 
pretensions of the Court of Rome, actually welcomed these 
industrious heretics, if so be the English people might learn their 
craft from them. 

Now, in three of the countries that I have mentioned — Eng- 
land in 1381 and onwards, Bohemia in 1410 and onwards, and 
the Low Countries from the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
owed the whole of the inspiration which determined them to 
resist what they conceived to be unwarranted opinion and un- 
warrantable authority, from the teaching of a single Englishman. 
Latterly, a society in England has been printing the works of 
Wycliff. From inquiries I have made among the leading mem- 
bers of this society, it appears to me that the gentlemen who 
publish the works of Wycliff do not read what he wrote. If they 
did, they would discover that John Wycliff was not only the most 
remarkable Churchman of his age, but the most remarkable 
statesman and the most singularly far-seeing economist. Wycliff 
found the doctrine which was very prevalent, very orthodox, and, 
I regret to say, very harmful, that kings and rulers were respon- 
sible to God alone. Wycliff expanded this doctrine by saying 
they were also responsible to men ; and the responsibility of 
kings and rulers to men is, I need not tell you, the very centre 
of modern constitutional government. It is the basis of all our 
liberties. As long as men were supposed to be responsible to 
God only, they did not mend their ways. As soon as they 
became convinced that they were to be made responsible to man 
also, they began to improve. 

Now, the form in which Wycliff put his argument may seem 



240 National Life and Thought. 

strange to us. He laid down the doctrine — and this was all that 
was known about his opinions till his great work was recently 
published — he laid down the doctrine that " dominion was 
founded in grace." He used, that is to say, current theological 
expressions to indicate his political and economical meaning. 

Now I will tell you what his interpretation of this was. It 
was alleged, he said, against his view, that kings and rulers are 
responsible to God only; but, he said, under no conception 
except that which is utterly heretical, can God be the author 
of evil ; but the practices of these persons plainly show that 
their deeds are evil, and, therefore, their authority cannot be 
derived from so high a sanction. All allegiance, says Wycliff 
in explanation of his doctrine, is due only to proved worthiness. 
That doctrine he inculcated ; that doctrine he taught the emis- 
saries of his religion. This doctrine was taken over the whole 
of the civilised world — was put down in most places by the strong 
hand of power, but was remembered as an important and real 
fact among the obscure sectaries that followed his teaching, and 
who are much more the authors of the English Reformation — 
the weavers, I mean, in Norfolk and other parts of England — 
than the miserable caitiffs who yielded to the caprices and whims 
of Henry VIII. It never passed out of the minds of these 
people, and in our day it has borne fruit ; for assuredly, as I said 
but now, the doctrine that all human authority is responsible to 
man — I do not deny that it is responsible to God also — has had a 
marvellously sweetening influence upon the conduct of public men. 

The system is not perfect yet. There are a good many people 
who want the salt rubbed in still. But, at any rate, the doctrine 
is admitted, however little the practice may accord with the doc- 
trine in certain individuals. I am afraid that we have got into 
a strange position with regard to one of these doctrines — the 
doctrine of ministerial responsibility. It seems to me that in 
these times nearly the whole responsibility which a wicked man 
getting into office has to suffer is that of being turned out again. 
If I had my way, and, I believe, if morality had its way, some- 
thing else would be in store for him besides this exceedingly 
moderate reprobation. 

Now, we have recently had a question raised as to what con- 
stitutes nationality ; and without any definition being given of that 
term, we have had the minor premiss in the nationality of par- 
ticular peoples abundantly criticised. We are told that one of 
the nations comprising the United Kingdom is a nationality, and 



Lessons from the Dutch Republic. 241 

that another is not a nationality, without much evidence being 
accorded on which to substantiate the distinction that is drawn 
between the two. Now, if you come to look at it in the light of 
origin, the Swiss are the most mixed of nations. A considerable 
portion of them is distinctly Italian, derived, probably, from the 
most ancient tribes which settled on the borders of Italy. A 
considerable portion of them is German, not a little of them is 
French, — that is to say, has been brought in ancient times dis- 
tinctly under " Latin influences ; " but, if you go from one 
extreme of Switzerland to the other, and all through its breadth, 
you will find that the whole of the cantons are united in the same 
determination to maintain, as far as possible, their individuality 
and their nationality. No more mixed race can be conceived 
than the Scotch. The northern part of Scotland, from the Tay 
upwards, with the exception of some intermediate settlements, is 
distinctly of Celtic origin. The southern part of Scotland is more 
Anglo-Saxon than England itself, and represents a purer Teu- 
tonic dialect than we speak, yet the whole of the Scotch have 
been fused into one race. No doubt sentiment played a little 
part in it, but the fact and the result remains. 

I remember a very distinguished man some time ago said that 
the crowning blessing of the Scotch people was the battle of 
Bannockburn — it made them a nation — and the crowning mis- 
fortune of the Irish people was the battle of Athenry. They were 
fought in the same year ; the Irish never virtually made head 
again, and the Scotch remained an independent nation till they 
were taken into the English Constitution by a treaty, as well as a 
union, and on terms of absolute equality, besides the fullest 
respect being shown to their local institutions. 

Now, nobody knows what was the origin of the ancient inhabit- 
ants of Holland. They speak, as you know, a dialect of German, 
which goes by the name of Low Dutch, but there is reason to 
believe that all sorts of nationalities, from the earliest times, were 
united, and inhabited that country. They constituted themselves, 
as I shall point out to you, a new race. 

Now, let us look for a moment at what the situation was when 
the Dutch, in 1572, ventured upon a conflict with Philip of Spain. 
Philip of Spain was a monarch who dreamed, as other monarchs 
have before and after him^ of universal empire, and he filled some 
of the most powerful states of Europe with dread. He was lord, 
practically, of the New World. The donation of Alexander VI., 
Pope and profligate, had bestowed upon him the whole of what is 

Q 



242 National Life and Thought. 

now called America, just as he bestowed on the House of Portugal 
the whole of the Eastern world. The famous bull of the Pope 
might not have meant it, but some of the captains who had been 
brought up under the discipline of Ferdinand and Isabella, suc- 
ceeded in adding vast kingdoms to the Spanish branch of the 
Austrian family, and the whole of the richest metalliferous districts 
of Central and South America passed under the sway of Spain. 
The resources of the monarch of Spain appeared to be inexhausti- 
ble. He had entirely overset the whole machinery by which the old 
world was supplied with money, and was himself part owner and toll- 
taker of allthegreat stores of precious metals which were being mined 
in the new world. He was also the king over a country which 
supplied the most redoubtable and the best-disciplined soldiery in 
Europe. The Spanish infantry was the type of all that was cour- 
ageous, of all that was resolute, of all that was ferocious and cruel. 
The power of Philip II., the heir to these vast dominions, com- 
prising also the principal industrial centre of the world, then the 
Low Countries or the Netherlands, and now Belgium, seemed to 
be greater than any other person could venture on encountering. 
On the other hand, was a small country not very much larger 
than Yorkshire, defended by incessant care from the encroachments 
of the ocean, without manufactures, without trade, without com- 
merce, and deriving a scanty substance from the fields which they 
rescued from the deep. These men dared on the ground of 
liberty and conscience to revolt, always under decent forms, and to 
resist the overwhelming power of Spain. It is impossible to con- 
ceive any conflict, the elements of which seemed more unlike and 
more unequal; the one the richest and most powerful state of 
Europe, the other the poorest and apparently the most helpless. 
From 1572 to 1609 the Dutch carried on their struggle with 
Philip and his successor ; they growing stronger and healthier 
every day, he weaker and more contemptible. Of course this was 
not the beginning of the struggle. The commencement of it was 
twenty-two years earlier, with the establishment of the Spanish 
Inquisition in the Low Countries, and it was against this establish- 
ment of the Spanish Inquisition in the Low Countries, and the 
entire control of the political system of what, for a short time, was 
called the United Netherlands, that the conflict had its origin. 

Now, in these days it would puzzle us why the monarchs of 
Europe should have been so alarmed at religious dissent or dis- 
content, why these powerful monarchs should have expended so 
much resolution, so much money, and so many lives in subduing 



Lessons from the Dutch Republic. 243 

so remote a portion of the earth. The reason was they knew that 
freedom in religious opinions involved the development of politi- 
cal freedom also. 

When James I. said, " No Bishop, no King," he was uttering a 
more sensible adage than he generally thought proper to lay down. 
I do not mean to say that our Puritan forefathers more than two 
centuries ago were perfectly wise and blameless in their actions 
and in their policy because they were still infected with a mad 
passion for securing uniformity, but at any rate they truly connected, 
the doctrine of political liberty with the doctrine of religious 
liberty, and they fought for both. And then, you see, there per- 
meated these people that strange and undying proposition that 
" Dominion is founded in grace," which is, being interpreted, 
" Allegiance is due to the leader only on proof of his worthiness." 
Now, he must have been a very astute courtier who could have 
discovered that Philip II. was worthy, or Henry IV., or, for that 
matter, Lewis XIV., all of whom aimed at universal empire, the 
second having had his career cut short when he was just going to 
precipitate the hideous Thirty Years' War, the last war of religion in 
Europe. 

Well, these Hollanders — inhabitants of a small country — a poor 
country, with very few natural defences, except those which could 
be adopted to their own apparent ruin — entered into this gigantic 
struggle. The work was all done by themselves. It is perfectly 
true that some help was accorded by our Queen Elizabeth. She 
was a much wiser woman than some of her biographers make her 
out to be. She was a very shrewd woman. She knew perfectly 
well that the independence of Holland was a fortress against 
the designs of Philip II. upon England; but then Elizabeth 
was desperately poor, and very shifty. Her father had stolen 
everything he could lay his hand upon, and squandered it in a 
way which does seem to me quite incredible and quite inex- 
plicable ; and she was left miserably poor. The Dutch had little 
help from her. I am not certain whether they did not get more 
mischief than help from the people she sent, for two of the 
captains that went over, rejoicing in the historic names of Stanley 
and Yorke, turned papists and traitors, and betrayed the towns 
that were put into their hands and the standards. The Stanleys 
have always been on the winning side ; they thought they were 
then; perhaps they think themselves there now. I will not attempt, 
even in your minds, to disabuse them of any impression of the 
kind. There was a little help pretended to them by France — the 



244 National Life and Thought. 

brother of the King of France went there as a commander-in- 
chief, just as our Elizabeth sent her favourite Leicester, who made 
nothing but a fool of himself during the time he was in Holland. 
Anjou tried to seize part of what was then within the control of 
the Dutch republic, and was deservedly shown up as a traitor and 
a knave. But, almost at the very time when the Dutch fishermen 
gained their first victory in the seizure of Brill, these reputed 
friends of Dutch freedom were planning the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew, and William the Silent knew, all the time that he was 
trying to get help from the French royal family, that the designs 
of that family were — and I do not find fault with them from the 
point of view of their own personal interests — to extirpate 
patriotism and freeth ought over the whole world. Nothing was 
really done by France — the Dutch did everything themselves. 

The form, then, which the resistance of the Dutch to their liege 
lord — that is the phrase the lawyers use ; lawyers are always in- 
venting terms which are intended to obscure justice — the form 
which the opposition of the Dutch took was a claim for freedom 
of conscience. When they achieved their independence, after 
a severe struggle, one of the stipulations which Philip III. of 
Spain wished to press upon them was that they should show 
toleration to Roman Catholics — that is to say, they claimed for 
persons of their own religion that which they had been fighting 
nearly forty years to refuse to the Dutch themselves. Of course 
there is a good deal of inconsistency in human nature. The 
Dutch naturally refused. If I were a diplomatist, and, on making 
peace with a neighbouring power, the neighbouring power intro- 
duced a clause into it that every inhabitant of the country I 
represented should read the Ten Commandments and say the 
Lord's Prayer every day, I should repudiate so preposterous a 
condition. You have no right to impose it — however important 
it may be to keep the Ten Commandments and to say the Lord's 
Prayer. The Dutch, therefore, refused to be bound by the terms 
of a treaty to toleration. But directly the treaty was granted in 
a grudging way in 1609, the Dutch instantly granted toleration. 
They took care, of course, that the public manifestations of the 
religion, which had striven to put them down by violence, should 
not be such as should cause offence to those who were liberated 
from such attempts, but the reasonable enjoyment of every religion 
was accorded. And many of you know the Dutch gave a harbour 
and a refuge to the Jews when they were almost expelled, or, at 
least, put under serious disabilities in the rest of the world. In 



Lessons f?'om the Dutch Republic. 245. 

other words, the Hollanders, at the very beginning, learned that r 
when they had fought for their own freedom, it was right for them 
to grant freedom to others. You know those who had opposed 
the working out of that. It has always struck me that one of the 
grandest acts the democracy has ever done — that is, a form of 
government in which there is no privileged class — was when the 
inhabitants of the northern part of the great American Republic, 
smarting with what they thought to have been an unjustifiable 
and wanton rebellion, aggravated by its attempt to maintain the 
greatest of all immoralities — personal slavery — had conquered, 
they put a curb on themselves, and pardoned the arch-traitor, who 
only died the other day. 

Now, the old doctrine of Europe was that all subjects should 
be of the religion of their rulers; and it must be admitted that 
the heads of the Anglican Church — the community to which I 
am proud to belong — -showed a marvellous alacrity in following 
the will of their rulers. I use the expression clerical caitiffs 
of the bishops who surrounded the throne of Henry VIII. 
Hardly one sacrificed himself against the overweening haughti- 
ness of that monarch. Now, during the time of Henry 
VIII., you know that there occurred a great reformation in 
Europe; but this doctrine, that the subject should be of the 
religion of his monarch or his ruler, was not attacked. All that 
Luther did was to kick out the Pope, and put the king in his 
place, and the consequence is that, to me, the Lutheran reform 
is, of all religious reforms, the most hollow and contemptible 
that I know. He put the king in the place of God. He gave 
no liberty to man whatever. There seems to be some discontent 
with what I say. When the peasants rose in revolt against the 
insupportable tyranny of their lords, the man who goaded these 
lords on to take the bitterest revenge on the peasants was Luther 
himself. He was not made of the stuff that Wycliff was. He 
was not made of the stuff of the Lollards, who held to their own 
view, although outward "manifestation of their opinion was sup- 
pressed. He handed over the inhabitants of Northern Germany 
from the Pope to the king, and I am not certain that they did 
not make a change for the worse when the transfer came. 

Now, what the Dutch laid down was the very reverse of this 
position. We have followed in this matter — imitating them with- 
out much gratitude. They laid down that the ruler should be 
of the religion of his people, and there is a good deal to be said 
for that. We found it was impossible in England that the 



246 National Life and Thought. 

monarchy of this country, even with very limited powers, should 
be of a religion which was antagonistic to the mass of the people, 
and we sent a certain monarch flying because he was obstinately 
determined, and we kept his descendants out of the throne be- 
cause they were obstinately determined that they would not be 
of the religion of the people. I do not mean to say that it does 
not look like a certain violation of what may be called the prin- 
ciples of absolute toleration, but if a person takes upon himself 
the extremely comfortable and well-paid office of king, I think, 
on the whole, he may be expected to submit to the conditions 
that are involved. 

Now, the Dutch won their independence by deeds of valour, 
which would take me, not one evening, but the whole of the 
Sunday evenings from now to midsummer, to recount. And 
what was the result? They became the first commercial nation 
in the world. They excited the envy and admiration of all other 
people — I regret to say, envy and admiration that were turned 
into bad and unjust intrigue. They were the source of 
nearly all the learning that was developed with the revival of 
letters. They invented all the principal arts of life. Among 
other things, they were the principal persons who developed a 
scientific agriculture, which was an object of admiration to our 
own writers in England long before the English people had 
the courage or the skill to adopt such a system of agriculture. 
I regret to say that, in my opinion, the English nation was for a 
long time the very stupidest in creation. There was no change 
in its agriculture from the time of Edward III. — no improve- 
ment — to the time of Charles I. You do not find a single 
painter in England till centuries after the art had been developed 
first across the water. You had Flemish and Dutch schools of 
painting when the only persons who plied the art in England were 
foreigners. Where did all your great artists come from ? Where 
did Holbein come from ? Where did Vandyck come from ? 
They were from foreign countries, and the first native-born 
English artist you had was Thornhill, who painted those stupid 
pictures in St. Paul's Cathedral. I always say that the English 
school of art does not begin till the middle of the 18th century. 
Well, we were just as backward in agriculture, we were just as 
backward in letters. There was one thing, I admit, in which the 
English people were very much to the front. They tried con- 
clusions over and over again with bad rulers, and then deposed 
them, and were not curious to inquire what became of them after 



Lessons from the Dutch Republic. 247 

they were deposed. The whole of Western Europe was the debtor 
of Holland in the arts of life. Its universities were frequented 
up to the middle of the 18th century by numbers of people, 
not only those who, by a narrow policy, were excluded from? 
our own universities, but by men who themselves received the 
benefit, such as it was, of some training in those ancient places 
of education. 

No doubt the Dutch committed errors. One of their gravest 
errors — they sinned in good company — was their attempt to 
maintain a sole market; that is to say, to get hold of certain 
portions of the earth's surface from which they excluded the 
ships and the sailors of every other country. We were just as 
unwise. All our wars in the 18th century were for the main- 
tenance of a sole market. We went into the war of the Austrian 
succession with a view to improve our Colonial possessions. 

The Seven Years' War was entirely for the purpose of a sole 
market, and the war with the American Colonies was waged in 
order to secure and maintain the same sole market that we had 
got by the war that ended with the Peace of Paris. Not a doubt 
the Dutch fell into this error. But it is an error which is being 
fallen into now. Why do you think the French people want to 
retain and to extend their African dominions — Algiers, Tunis, 
Tripoli, if they can get it — but to maintain there a sole market, 
and to exclude the goods of every other country ? What do you 
think induced the illustrious Prince Bismarck to encourage 
Colonial Empire in Germany, but to carry into it the German 
tariff, and to exclude everybody else from the country? These 
same follies are being perpetrated by statesmen at the present 
day, and if you look to see what the result is, I will warrant 
this, that it costs the German taxpayer the whole of twenty marks 
in value for every twenty marks of goods he imports or exports. 
He gets nothing by it. The Dutch fell into this error indeed. 
They strove to exclude other people from the markets that they 
had discovered and appropriated in the old world, and the result 
was that the nations met them with jealousy, and nowhere more 
than by the Governments of this country. 

I think one of the most scandalous pages in our national 
history is the conspiracy of the English Government — Stuart and 
Hanoverian — against the integrity of the Dutch Republic. In 
an evil hour, and against the remonstrances of the Dutch them- 
selves, the Princes of the House of Orange intermarried with the 
Stuarts. They only got one good Prince out of the lot of them ? 



248 National Life and TlwugJit. 

and he was quite as serviceable to us as he was to them — 
William III. Then afterwards the House of Orange were inter- 
married with the Hanoverian family, and from that day they 
have steadily declined. We did everything we could to check 
their trade, to destroy their influence, and to do them harm. 
We passed, for example, the Navigation Acts, with the sole pur- 
pose of crippling and damaging the Dutch trade, and even so 
great a man as Adam Smith, commenting on the Navigation 
Acts, knowing that they were commercially mischievous, justified 
them on the ground that defence was better than opulence. 
They never gave one or the other ; they were no use to us at 
all. 

Whether one looks at the resources on the side of the two 
Commonwealths, or whether one looks at the utter want of 
military skill on the part of the weaker of the two, one is filled 
with amazement at the courage and resolution of the Dutch. 
Their first victories were on the sea — which was very natural, so 
to speak, because they were expert fishermen, and finally they 
became expert in more important maritime undertakings. If you 
look at the benefits that they have conferred on modern Europe by 
the development of the sciences and the arts — for they challenged 
almost all the great discoveries that have been made in modern 
times ; they have claimed, for instance, the invention of the tele- 
scope, and yet the man I spoke to you about just now — Wycliff 
— knew all about it, for in the very book to which I have been 
referring, he gave a description of the telescope, and of the 
wonders that it effects ; and then, as would be natural to the 
theologian, he said, at the conclusion of his description of the 
process by which a telescope was made, the function of this 
instrument is like the function of faith, it brings things remote 
near to us, and makes things small clear to us. But in those 
days you must know that, if any man had any exceptional know- 
ledge, he ran the risk of being accused of sorcery, and that was 
even worse than heresy. 

But it always seems to me that the greatest lesson that you can 
derive from the history of the Dutch — for it is from these facts in 
history that one should gather lessons — is that you should never 
despair of being in a minority. No minority ever seemed more 
hopeless than the minority of the Seven United Provinces when 
they threw down the gauntlet to Philip of Spain. Minorities 
have constantly been, to all appearance, hopelessly weak, and yet 
are on the high road to victory. I remember, when I was a young 



Lessons from the Dutch Republic. 249 

man, and took my part as an undergraduate at Oxford in the 
liberation of the poor man's cupboard from the oppressive bread 
tax, at which time I knew the eminent man who used to lecture 
in this chapel, the body that supported this measure of justice to 
the English people seemed very small and very feeble ; and yet, 
within three years after the youngest of the party who advocated 
the reform in Parliament went into Parliament, those laws were 
irrevocably abolished. Never despair of a minority ! If your 
conscience convinces you you are in the right, stick to it. To 
stick to a minority is constantly a high act of religion. Do not 
take the wicked advice of Lord Melbourne, and stick to the 
unpopular side till the other get the upper hand, because, said 
the old cynic, in this way you get an advantage from both sides : 
but, even though it seem to be hopeless, if you are convinced 
that a thing is right, stand to it. 

I do not say that any of us in this day can win the well-deserved 
reputation which Holland won among all those persons who study 
impartially and wisely the course of European history, but the 
strength of great movements is not made up by counting the units 
of the force which compose it, but by adding one's own force to 
that which already exists. Of all the pitiful kinds of vanity, none, 
I think, is more pitiful than that of the man who wants to have 
measured for him by his fellows what has been the part which he 
has played in doing good to mankind. Let him work for his own 
hand, for his own conscience, to the end which he puts before him. 
The best heroes of the Dutch War of Independence were obscure 
men. They had no great place, and they wanted no great place. 
But they felt they should live, if not in the memory of their 
countrymen, in the constant endurance of that great work to 
which they had put their hand, and from which, unlike the miser- 
able aristocracy of Holland, they never flinched. That at least, 
the doing of one's ow r n work in one's own generation, for what one 
holds to be a high and noble, and righteous purpose, is in every- 
body's hands, and a man at least knows, when he carries out these 
ends, that he is, if not seeking for a niche in the Temple of Fame, 
doing that which is much better than all the reputation which 
individual man can ascribe to individual motives and individual 



XIV. 
BELGIUM. 

ALFRED WATHELET. 

IF Belgium has been for the last sixty years an independent 
and free nation, the fact should not surprise any one 
acquainted with her past history. Her present existence as a 
well-characterised nationality, and the advanced development of 
her political life, are better understood when one remembers the 
many efforts and struggles of the old Flemings and Walloons for 
conquering and maintaining their free charters, and for shaking 
off the yoke of foreign domination. What Belgium at present 
enjoys of liberties of all kinds, which many a greater country 
must envy, is deeply rooted in her provincial and communal 
institutions of the past centuries; while the brave citizens who 
brought about Belgian independence in 1830 had received from 
their forefathers many an example of a stern, if not so successful, 
resistance against foreign masters. It will therefore be rational 
to study Belgium as it is now in the light of the history of her 
old times. 

The name of Belgian is of Celtic origin. The Belgae of Caesar, 
whom he calls the bravest in Gaul, were Celtic-speaking tribes, 
who inhabited the territories between the Rhine, the Somme, and 
the North Sea. During the first centuries several irruptions 
brought in their midst numerous German tribes, who became the 
majority ; among these arose the power and dynasty of Clovis. 
From Belgian soil also — from the banks of the Meuse — sprang 
afterwards the greatness of the race of the Pepins and Charle- 
magne. 

Then, from the ruin of the great empire of Occident, we see 
Belgium dividing itself into a number of small sovereignties. 
They were the duchies of Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg; the 
counties of Flanders, Hainault, Namur; the Prince-Bishopric 
of Liege, and others. The county of Flanders became superior 



252 National Life and Thought. 

to all others, while flourishing by its industry and commercial 
activity. At the end of the fourteenth century, the main line of 
the Counts of Flanders being extinct, their possessions passed 
into the hands of the Dukes of Burgundy. 

Duchies and counties were not the only power which had 
sprung in Belgium from the darkness and chaos after the disso- 
lution of the empire of Charlemagne. If here we see small 
sovereign houses, there we see, in antagonism with them, free 
communes, like distinct republics — each defending itself, having 
its charters, its guilds, its courts of justice, its finances. Where 
the communes are mighty, the dynasties are powerless ; where the 
dynasties are strongly established, the institutions of the commune 
remain undeveloped. We see the influence of the commune 
predominate in Flanders and Liege ; while the reigning houses 
rule over Hainault, Namur, Luxemburg. The communes of 
Bruges, Ghent, Louvain, Liege, produce heroic tribunes like Van 
Artevelde, Breydel, and De Coninck ; the Belgian dynasties, 
after taking a brilliant part in the Crusades, give kings to many 
a great throne — Godefroid of Bouillon, King of Jerusalem; the 
Baldwins of Flanders and Namur, Emperors of Constantinople; 
John, Count of Luxemburg and King of Bohemia; Charles of 
Luxemburg and his descendants, Emperors of the Romans. 

Among the numerous charters by which the communes 
obtained recognition of rights eagerly vindicated, the Charter of 
Albert de Cuyck., granted by that Prince-Bishop to the citizens of 
Liege at such an early date as the end of the twelfth century, the 
Great Charter of Bruges (1304), and the foyeuse Entree of Brabant 
(1354), stand like monuments of liberal guarantees, proclaiming 
individual freedom, right of association, judging of the citizens by 
magistrates chosen from among their ranks, free administration 
of the commune by the citizens. In Liege, so inviolable was the 
domicile of any citizen, that there was a saying, Pauvre homme 
en sa viaison roy est ; nobody could be arrested but by an order 
of the echevins ; no taxes levied without the consent of the city ; 
no military service required but for the defence of the territory. 
In 13 1 2 another charter established in Liege the principle of 
separation of the three powers — legislative, judicial, and executive; 
and afterwards the "Tribunal des XXII." was instituted as a 
sanction to the responsibility of all public officials. At that time 
already the democratic spirit was triumphing in Liege definitely, 
and Michelet can say that the Commune of Liege from the four- 
teenth century gives the standard of the most complete political 



Belgium. 253 

equality that ever existed. In Brabant, the Charter of Joyense 
Entree openly proclaims the right of citizens to refuse obedience 
to the sovereign who would not observe the communal liberties. 
So we can go back to the free traditions of the communes for 
the origin of many an enlightened principle of which Belgian 
institutions can boast nowadays. That communal movement 
which brought about the intervention of the burgess element 
in public affairs, is intimately connected with the development of 
the numerous guilds or corps-de-metiers, which, while bringing 
honour and power to artisanship, had the happiest influence on 
trade prosperity in the communes. Nor did the social progress 
restrict itself within the walls of the cities ; for there dates also 
from that time a great amelioration in the condition of the rural 
masses by the alleviation or complete abolition of serfdom. The 
history of the communes is not less characterised by their patriotic 
resistance against foreign interference than by their free spirit ; and 
the victory of the Flemish citizen-troops over a powerful French 
army near Courtray in 1302 (battle of the Golden Spurs) may be 
recorded, among others, as a glorious feat. 

Frequent intercourse and treaties of the communes with each 
other and with the sovereigns began to prepare the unification 
of Belgium, which was to be accomplished under the Dukes 
of Burgundy. That House succeeded, by wars and alliances, in 
destroying the local dynasties, and partly in doing away with the 
franchises of the communes, though these were to leave traces in 
the institutions of the country down to the present day. While 
the Dukes were centralising in their own hands the power over 
the whole of the Netherlands, industry and commerce in Flanders 
were enjoying a singular prosperity ; Bruges, Ypres, Ghent, were 
the market places of half the civilised world. Charles the Bold 
was the last Duke of Burgundy ; he had the passion of conquering, 
without the qualities of a monarch; he could have been the 
creator of an important kingdom, his disorderly ambition made 
him only an adventurer. The daughter of Charles, Mary of 
Burgundy, married in 1477 Maximilian, who was to be Emperor 
of Germany. That union made the Netherlands the accessory of 
other States, and so they were to be for centuries. 

The ten years that Maximilian had the regency over the Belgian 
provinces after the death of Mary were years of struggles between 
that Prince and the States of Flanders and the communes of 
Ghent and Bruges, and these patriotic bodies then showed admir- 
able tenacity and fortitude in the defence of their privileges. By 



254 National Life and Thought. 

the help of a powerful army Maximilian could be master of Ghent 
and tear into pieces the charter of its privileges ; but, King of the 
Romans as he was then, the proud Commune of Bruges kept him 
for several months a prisoner, until he would swear on a public 
place of Bruges, before an immense assembly, to observe the 
peace consented by the States of Flanders. This solemn oath 
did not refrain him from bringing again a foreign army, with which 
he at length humiliated the Commune of Bruges as he had done 
that of Ghent. 

However, when the grandson of Maximilian, Charles V., 
came into possession of the Netherlands, which he united to 
that of Spain and the Empire, it may be said that the Flemish 
race was at its apogee, having attained a degree of commercial 
prosperity which was only to be equalled by her splendour in the 
arts. Charles V. was born a Belgian himself, and remembered it ; 
he associated the Belgians to all the great events of his long reign ; 
Belgians were in his council and at the head of his armies ; but 
he was fighting for a dream of universal dominion, never to be 
realised. When Protestantism began to spread in the Low 
Countries, Charles persecuted it implacably, and many artisans 
from Flanders fled to Germany and England, where they brought 
with them much of the Flemish trade and industry. Yet Charles 
used a mild treatment if compared with the cruelties to which 
religious exaltation led Philip II., who had nothing Belgian, no 
heart for Belgians, but all the hatred of fanaticism in his soul. 
These were the darkest pages of the history of the Netherlands, 
when, the practices of the Inquisition tribunals having driven the 
people into rebellion, Philippe sent the Duke of Alva to devastate 
the country and erect scaffolds everywhere, 

At length the northern portion of the Low Countries established- 
its independence as the Republic of the United Provinces. 
Belgium, which had much greater difficulties to resist, having no 
natural defences when the Dutch had the water of the rivers and 
the sea to protect them, remained under Spain. Philippe 
granted the sovereignty of the Belgian provinces to his daughter 
Isabella and her husband Archduke Albert, who attempted to 
restore prosperity, and partly succeeded ; but after thirty-five years 
of a peaceful reign, they died without issue. And again Belgium 
was in the hands of Spain, sharing her declining fortunes, always 
exposed to the first attack in the wars of Spain with France, and 
of France with Holland, and paying for peace at the expense of her 
own territory. 



Belg ium. 255 

In 1 7 13 Belgium was assigned to Austria, and governed thence 
sometimes smoothly, but with indifference by princes who lived 
elsewhere. Dutch garrisons were in Belgian fortresses, and the 
Scheldt was closed to Belgian navigation, and Antwerp entirely 
separated from the sea. However, under the mild rule of Maria 
Theresa, Belgium enjoyed a wiser administration and more 
happiness than it had known for a long time. But this period of 
calm was not to last under Joseph II., who, superior in knowledge 
to those he was to govern, and more of a philosopher than of a 
monarch, pretended to rule over his people as he would, says 
a historian, have made a book. He attempted to curb the power 
of the priests, but he excited the religious feelings of one of the 
most Catholic countries that were. Then he gave much offence 
to the States by trying to overturn the government. A few weeks 
after the beginning of the French Revolution, a revolution broke 
out at Brussels, mainly prepared by the monks who had been 
deprived of their convents. But the success of this revolt did not 
last, discord being among the leaders of the movement ; nor was 
the return of Austrian soldiers endurable. The forces of the 
French Republic soon invaded Belgium, and had no great 
difficulty in conquering a country exhausted by interior divisions. 
It is worth mentioning that with the French domination there 
came to an end the temporal power of the Prince-Bishops of 
Liege ; it had lasted for many centuries through an eventful and 
interesting history, which would deserve special treatment, and 
highly testifies to the free and patriotic spirit of the citizens of 
Liege. 

The generous ideas proclaimed in France in 1789 soon made 
a deep impression in the Belgian provinces. The new spirit of 
equality, of tolerance and progress which they introduced among 
populations well prepared for it (this especially true of Liege), 
was not the only beneficent influence of the French regime in 
Belgium. Though its excessive centralisation met, especially in 
Flemish provinces, with a latent force of resistance, the fact that 
Belgians were then submitted to a common legislation and a 
uniform administration did much to prepare them for national 
unity. With a civil organisation which was a great improvement 
on the complicated system of the past, Belgium also owes to the 
French period the benefit of civil and criminal laws, of which the 
greater part has remained in force till the present day. 

In 18 14 no national dynasty could present itself to claim for 
Belgium, and the Treaty of Paris gave it, as a heritage vacant, 



256 National Life and Thought. 

to the Stadtholder of the United Provinces, who was raised to 
the dignity of a king. Under several respects that reunion 
seemed to be a reasonable arrangement. The industry of the 
Belgian provinces was to find in the colonies and the large trade 
of the Dutch an immense opening. Also a fusion existed already 
between Flemings and Dutchmen, who had the same origin, 
the same language, and had only been separated by the feudal 
divisions of territories, and afterwards by the religious quarrels. 
But how were the Walloon provinces, of French language, 
customs, and sympathies, — how would these submit to the new 
rule? The fundamental law of the new kingdom was a liberal 
charter, but that is the only praise deserved by the Dutch 
supremacy. The new monarchy represented in Belgium the 
foreigner ; a mild and conciliatory policy would have made 
Belgians forget this; but during the fifteen years of their rule, 
neither the king nor the Dutch nation did what was necessary 
to render themselves tolerable, and fault after fault was com- 
mitted which rendered the necessity of a rupture unavoidable. 
The use of the French language was not allowed in the public 
and judicial acts ; an iniquitous electoral system secured the 
political preponderance of the northern provinces, which had 
only half the population of the southern ; in the north was the 
seat of all the great public establishments, in which nearly all 
places were given to Dutchmen ; also there was an anti-catholic 
tendency in the laws, which was no small factor of discontent 
among Belgians. A few unhappy incidents made the measure 
full, and a revolution broke out at Brussels in August 1830, 
which caused the whole of the Belgian provinces to rise in the 
vindication of their independence. By driving Flemings and 
Walloons into a common resistance. King William had greatly 
helped them to bring together the elements of a nation. 

Brave and able men were the chiefs of that movement, which 
improvised in a few weeks of struggles an independent Belgium — 
Rogier, Devaux, Lebeau, de Merode, de Potter, J. B. Nothomb, 
and others — and seldom was seen a more remarkable assembly 
of men of talent and eloquence than that National Congress 
which gave Belgium its Constitution. A few months after the 
Congress had met, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, proclaimed 
King of the Belgians, swore before them to observe the funda- 
mental pact. The independence of the new State, however, was 
only recognised by the great Powers after very difficult diplomatic 



Belgium. 257 

^negotiations, in which the Belgian delegates, Van de Weyer, 
Nothomb, Devaux, played their part with energy and skill. The 
election of Prince Leopold was no small help to their endeavours 
for winning the goodwill of the Powers. The young kingdom 
was much indebted to France for the intervention at a critical 
moment of a French army which successfully operated at the 
siege of Antwerp and took the place from the Dutch. The 
•sympathy of England under the ministry of Lord Grey and 
Palmerston also greatly contributed to bring the recognition and 
guarantee of Belgian independence and neutrality by the Treaty 
of London of the 15th November 1831. Holland only acknow- 
ledged the accomplished facts in 1839. 

The Belgian Constitution is the pride of the movement of 1830. 
It has attributed to civil society all the liberties that could be 
brought by the republican system, while keeping the guarantees 
-of monarchical heredity. It proclaims the equality of all citizens 
before the law, the suppression of all privileges attached to 
nobility, the liberty of the press, the liberty of teaching, the right 
of free petition, the inviolability of home, the trial by jury for all 
criminal and political charges and for offences of the press, the 
free exercise of all religions and their equality, the exclusion of 
all. interference of the State in religious matters. No other Euro- 
pean country has fully enjoyed so many liberties. 

The executive power belongs to the King, who exercises it 
through his Ministers responsible before the two Chambers — the 
Chamber of Representatives and the Senate. This principle of 
•ministerial responsibility is one of the most important innovations 
of the Belgian Charter compared to the fundamental law of 
1 8 14. The King convokes, prorogues, and dissolves Parliament. 
The throne is hereditary by order of primogeniture in the male 
descendants. 

The House of Representatives is elected for four years by 
citizens above twenty-five years of age, and paying 42 francs in 
taxes to the State. The Senate is elected for eight years by the 
same body of electors, but only those who pay 2000 francs in 
direct taxes are eligible, and they must be over forty years of age; 
while the minimum age of twenty-five years is the only condition 
for eligibility to the Chamber of Representatives. Parliament is 
re-elected by half every two years for the Chamber, and every four 
years for the Upper House, which arrangement greatly contributes 
-to make the political system work smoothly, and to avoid the 
peril of too sudden changes. All revision of the constitutional 

R 



258 National Life and TJwitgJtt. 

law must be demanded by the two Houses acting separately, and 
can only be discussed after re-election of Parliament. 

All judges are chosen by the King, on lists presented by the 
Law Courts and the Senate and the Provincial Councils. 

The national charter, of which we have thus given a brief 
summary, has remained unaltered; it can be called a monu- 
ment of rational freedom and liberality, and has had a great 
and felicitous influence on the progress and prosperity of the 
nation. 

The provincial and communal laws are also deserving of great 
praise. They leave to the provincial and local councils a con- 
siderable authority, and the solution of many important questions. 
Each of the nine provinces is administered by a governor, Avith 
the assistance of a permanent delegation of six members of the 
provincial council. This council meets every year to deal with 
all matters of provincial concern ; its members are elected for 
four years. Each of the 2500 communes has its administrative 
body, with a burgomaster, several echevins, and a more or less 
numerous communal council, elected for six years. Burgo- 
masters, like the governor of the province, are appointed by the 
King, generally in agreement with the majority of the Council. 
Echevins, or assistants of the burgomaster, are chosen by the 
Communal Council. The burgomaster and his echevins are the 
local Executive Board, and share with the Council the gestion of 
all municipal interests. 

Under the beneficial effect of such laws, the Belgians have now 
been for sixty years consolidating their national existence, and 
working their politics in a most regular way ; not without very 
acute controversies and agitations, but these were only the natural 
outcome of the free play of institutions which are and will remain 
dear to the nation. 

Catholics and Liberals, the two parties, very nearly of equal 
strength, which divide Belgian politics, have had several times in 
turn the management of public affairs. They are respectively much 
of the same nature as the Conservative and Liberal parties in other 
countries ; but a special and important factor in Belgian politics 
is the considerable influence of the Catholic clergy. The Belgian 
populations being in majority intensely Catholic, the clergy have 
kept a strong hold on the conscience of the people, and, naturally 
enough, give their full support to a party whose first purpose is to 
maintain the supremacy of the Church. Within the last twenty 



Belgium. 259 

years the antagonism between Catholics and Liberals has become 
more and more acute ; Liberalism has been many a time treated 
on the other side as heresy; and though the Liberal leaders 
denied that they were hostile to religious ideas, declaring they 
only wanted the independence and neutrality of the civil power, 
the tendency has been towards making political matters more 
and more mixed with religious ones, so that leading Liberals are 
nowadays nearly all out of the pale of the Roman Church, and 
in fact of any Church, Protestantism having hardly made any 
progress in Belgium. 

During the first years of the Belgian government, predominance 
belonged to the Catholics, though the two parties were then for 
a time, so to say, in a latent state. The success of the Revolution 
had been due to the union of both elements ; while the eyes were 
still turned towards the frontier, the safety of the country 
commanded to maintain that Union. In the Government, 
Catholic and Liberal members were meeting on a friendly footing, 
brought there more by the ascendency of their talent and their 
devotion to the country than by a political party. However, as 
the nation was beginning to feel reassured against the external 
dangers, parties were soon organising themselves, and that 
struggle was beginning, which is now more ardent than ever. 
On the Liberal side were Devaux, Rogier, Lebeau ; on the other, 
as an enlightened and tolerant Catholic, J. B. Nothomb. The 
ministry headed by this remarkable man saw the last years of the 
Catholic-Liberal Union. Fifteen years after the establishment of 
the kingdom, that Union was banished from practical politics. 
Under M. de Theux a real Catholic ministry was formed, of which 
young M. Malou was the heart and soul. The Liberal ideas, 
eloquently defended in Parliament, were then advocated through 
the country with great talent and success at the Liberal Congress 
in the same year. Laying down the programme of a new policy, 
claiming the independence of the civil power, and obligation for 
the heads of the clergy to remain within the limits of their 
special functions, the Liberals carried so unanimously the opinion 
of the great towns, that M. Malou had to give way, and a new 
Cabinet was formed, with Messrs. Rogier and Frere Orban ; the 
influence of the last soon became preponderant. It was due to 
the confidence which the country professed for the Government, 
as well as to the wisdom and great popularity of King Leopold, 
that Belgium could pass in tranquillity through the storm which 
in 1848 shook all Europe. By wise and opportune concessions 



260 National Life and TJiouglit. 

to the democratic spirit, especially by reducing to the constitu- 
tional minimum the tax required qualification for parliamentary 
franchise, and by organising the civic guards in the country, they 
prevented all excesses and disarmed demagogy. 

The grave event which, on the 2nd December 185 1, placed 
France once more under a despotic rule, produced its reaction 
in the small neighbouring country. The great difficulties which 
were created in Belgium by the government of Napoleon III. 
on account of the attacks of the Liberal party against the man 
of the 2nd December, the presence of so many French refugees 
on Belgian territory, the threats of semi-official French papers 
against the safety of Belgium as a nation, all that turned to the 
profit of the Catholic opposition, and contributed to the retreat 
of the Liberal administration. 

The Catholic ministry under Messrs. De Decker and Vilain 
XIIII. came to power with prospects of moderation and an omen 
•of interior peace and prosperity, which soon proved deceiving. 
Led by the exigencies of the Ultramontanes to present a bill 
bringing privileges to the convents, namely, withdrawing from 
the control of the State all legacies and endowments by private 
persons in their favour, the ministry saw such an agitation spread 
through the country against that measure that they had to 
adjourn it, and soon after to retire. 

Again in power after elections in favour of the Liberal party, 
M. Frere Orban signalised his administration by important 
economical measures, such as the abolition of the octrois and 
the establishment of a system of customs tariffs approaching free 
trade, and by organising at great expense the defence of the 
country through an extended line of fortifications. After the 
lamented death in 1865 of King Leopold I., the Liberal ministry 
remained in power for five years under Leopold II. It should 
not be forgotten to give credit to M. Frere Orban for having at 
that time successfully resisted the perfidious designs of Napoleon 
III. in the affair of the Luxemburg Railway, a railway through 
Belgian territory, which the French government, knowing its great 
strategical importance, wanted to get into their own hands ; but 
the sagacious diplomacy and decisive action of M. Frere Orban 
were able to counteract the plans of the French Emperor, which 
would have brought upon Belgium an invasion during the 
following war. 

Since that time, Belgium, as if obeying a periodical wish for a 
change in her politics, has had a Catholic ministry for eight years, 



Belgium. 26 r 

a Liberal Cabinet during six years, and now has had again, since 
1884, a Catholic administration. 

The question of popular education is the one which has for 
many years been the greatest object of division and eager dis- 
cussions in Belgian politics. Under Mr. J. B. Nothomb in 
1842, a law on elementary education had been passed which was 
inspired by a spirit of compromise, leaving to the Catholic clergy 
considerable prerogatives and influence in the schools. While 
enacting that there should be at least one primary school in every 
commune, that bill gave freedom to the communes to adopt one 
or more private schools, possessing the legal qualifications, so as 
to occupy the place of the communal school; it placed the 
primary schools under the surveillance of the communal authorities 
and Government inspectors, while the imparting of moral and 
religious instruction was to be superintended by ecclesiastical 
delegates. In the great towns, where Liberal ideas were predom- 
inant, the schools under the law of 1842 were kept more indepen 
dent from the influence of the clergy, but it is true to say that in 
the greater part of the rural districts the Church was master of the 
primary schools. When the elections in 1878 brought M. Frere 
Orban to power, it was the general expectation of the Liberal party 
that there should be a new law of primary education, based 
strictly on the constitutional principle of independence of the 
State towards the Church and equality of all creeds. The Bill 
which was passed in 1879 stated that religious instruction would 
be given in all schools either by the clergy of all creeds, or by a 
special teacher chosen by the communal council. A special room 
in the school was to be put at the disposal of the clergy to give 
their religious teaching before or after school hours ; ecclesiastical 
inspection of the schools was suppressed ; communal authorities, 
were deprived of the faculty of adopting, unless by Government 
permission, private or denominational (Catholic) schools instead 
of the official ones. So the schools were taken away from the 
influence of the clergy, to pass entirely under that of the State,, 
independent of all creeds. The events did not allow this system 
of lay schools to show lasting results. The bishops and clergy 
undertook against the new law a campaign of resistance, which, SO' 
to say, terrorised peasants and inhabitants of small towns. From 
the pulpit, the schools of the State were condemned as atheistic ; 
the bishops refused their priests the authorisation to give religious 
teaching in the room offered them in every school ; sacraments were 



262 National Life and Thought. 

refused to teachers and children of these schools ; under the threat 
of excommunication, hundreds of teachers left the State schools. 
The Liberal Cabinet defended itself with great energy; how- 
ever, they had met more than their match, and the agitation 
of which their bold innovation was the subject throughout 
the country is one among the different causes which brought 
the fall of the Frere Orban ministry in 1884. It was only to be 
•expected that the first result of the great Catholic reaction at the 
general elections of that year would be some new organisation of 
elementary education so as to replace it under ecclesiastical 
influence. The new law by which the Catholic majority realised 
their purpose is in many respects different from the law of 1842 : 
the schools have been put under communal autonomy, with the 
faculty for the burgomaster and his council, whenever they have 
the approval of the Government and the Committee of the 
Provincial Council, to abolish the official school and adopt in its 
place a private or denominational one ; religious teaching, under 
ecclesiastical direction, can be inscribed or not by the municipality 
in the programme of the schools ; if it is not inscribed in the 
programme, and twenty heads of family claim against it, the 
Government may oblige the municipality to adopt and support a 
private school for the minority. In several large towns, the 
communal authorities having refused to organise religious teaching 
to be given by the Catholic clergy, they have had to provide for 
private schools belonging to Catholic congregations, which compete 
most eagerly against the official schools. The authorisation 
granted by the Government to hundreds of rural communes to 
adopt private schools instead of the old State schools has created 
in the Liberal camp an irritation which can only be compared to 
the anger among Catholics a few years before. 

Another section of Belgian politics upon which parties have been 
for many years most busily engaged is the question of electoral 
franchise, whether for Parliament or for the province and 
commune. The restricted suffrage, based upon a certain amount 
paid in taxes, has been, especially for the last ten years, the object 
of violent attacks from the more advanced section of the Liberal 
party. Though it cannot be denied that to the restricted " suffrage 
censitaire " and to the parliaments it elected are due all the great 
reforms enjoyed by Belgium since her first days of independence, 
and though every notable diminution of the electoral franchise 
has proved an ultimate loss to the Liberal party, the Radical 
minority among Liberals have been most eager in claiming for 



Belgium. 263 

a revision of the constitutional charter with a view to abolish the 
tax-paying privilege. One cannot see, however, that there is any- 
thing like a great desire in the nation at large for such a serious 
innovation, advocated by a body of politicians much more noisy 
than numerous. The policy of M. Frere Orban, foreseeing that 
universal suffrage at present in Belgium would be most certainly 
Catholic, has been to resist with all his energy the idea of pro- 
moting any too sudden change in the lowering of the franchise. 
It has, however, been to the honour of that statesman, in his last 
administration, to introduce into the electoral laws the new prin- 
ciple of an educational qualification for the provincial and com- 
munal franchise : to the body of electors by virtue of tax-paying 
has been added a large number of electors by virtue of profes- 
sions or positions (persons exercising liberal professions, holders 
of diplomas, officials in public services, officers in the army or the 
garde civique, etc.), and also by virtue of an electoral examination 
passed successfully, according to the requirements specified by 
the law. More than 100,000 citizens have been thus endowed 
with the franchise. It is a very interesting experiment, which 
may lead later on to an extension of the franchise for Parliament. 
A singular fact in Belgian politics is that, by the turn of elec- 
tions, it is not infrequent to see in Parliament a majority which 
does not correspond to the real position and strength of the two 
parties. The larger constituencies have a rather important num- 
ber of representatives, who are elected with the scrutin de liste by 
majority. As in districts like Brussels, Ghent, and Antwerp, of 
which alone the members occupy a quarter of the seats in Parlia- 
ment, Liberals and Catholics muster often nearly the same total of 
electors, it may happen that 200 voters or less have it in their 
power to turn the scale and return to the Chamber thirty-two 
Catholics or thirty-two Liberals, as they choose. Thus one 
comes to results such as these: The Liberals having in 1878 the 
majority in Parliament when the total number of electors who 
had voted for them in the various districts was actually the 
minority, and now there is in the House of Representatives a 
number of ninety-five Catholic members against forty Liberals 
only, when the strength of the two parties in the electoral body is 
nearly equal. Such a system, in which the strongest majorities 
depend upon a minimum of uncertain voters, is a wrong system ; 
and fair-minded men on both sides, among whom the present 
Prime Minister, M. Beernaert, and the eminent economist, M. 
Lmile de Laveleye, are now advocating representation of minorities, 



264 National Life and TJiongJit. 

which would render the direction of politics less a matter of 
chance and give more stabilit} 7 to the Government, while securing 
it a more solid and true basis in public opinion. 

A study of Belgian affairs ought not to omit reference to a 
question which has of late grown in importance — -the question of 
languages. Since the kingdom of Belgium existed, French has 
always been the language of the cultured classes ; and, in fact, it 
is now more than ever understood, if not exclusively spoken, 
among the great majority of Belgians. But since a few years 
there has been a reawakening of the friends of the Flemish tongue, 
who pretend theirs is much more a national language than the 
French, for this peculiar reason, that it is hardly spoken anywhere 
else than in Belgium. Flemings are certainly deserving of sym- 
pathy when they think they must keep with a kind of veneration 
the language of their brave forefathers, of their poets, and their 
great novelist Conscience. But when they claim for and obtain 
the use of Flemish in all public documents, on coins, and street 
corners — more than that, in the law courts and public assemblies 
— and want the obligation of knowing Flemish to be imposed 
upon all officers in the army, it seems doubtful whether they are 
pursuing a very useful and patriotic course. The future belongs 
to the great languages spoken by millions and millions ; it does 
not belong to the Flemish language. For the good of Belgium, 
as well as for the peaceful union of her populations, it is to be 
hoped that the practical preponderance of the French tongue 
will not suffer too much from the pious zeal of a few Flemish 
men of letters, who, as it seems, would like to create a barrier 
between Flemings and Walloons. That barrier is not to be. 
Exaggerations on either side have not provoked, so far, any 
serious friction of feelings between the two elements ; and one 
may trust that the good sense of the nation will always give reason 
to the words of the poet, a "Walloon : " Fleming, Walloon, are but 
Christian names; Belgian is the name of the family !" 

With its large population of working men in the rich industrial 
provinces of Liege, Namur, and Hainault, Belgium has seen for 
some years an eager tendency develop itself among the working 
classes to claim a better state of things for themselves. The 
great strikes, which were not always without justification, have 
impressed upon the public at large the necessity of doing some- 
thing to better the material and moral life of the workman. 
While wages were raised to a fairer level, both parties have met 
to promote beneficial laws in the popular interest, namely, 



Belgium. 265 

securing arbitral decision of differences between the workmen 
and their employers, protecting the miners against underground 
accidents, forbidding the employment of children and women for 
heavy work, resisting the evil of intemperance, and so on. 

If we take a general survey of Belgium at the present time, we 
may consider her as a remarkable country for her great civic 
liberties of all kinds, and the development of her political life. 
Belgians love their institutions and national independence, which 
have been bought at the cost of such hard times in the past 
centuries and struggles on so many occasions. No doubt, if 
ever the hour of danger should come, Belgian patriotism would 
give a good account of itself. If there is a fault in the way 
Belgians understand and practise politics, we should say it is that 
the partisan spirit is too much infused in the life of the people ; 
that a fair tolerance of adverse opinions is often left to be desired ; 
and that the animosity between Liberal and Clerical interferes in 
social as well as in public life, reducing sometimes political war- 
fare to miserably petty and narrow strifes. 

It has been said that Belgians have inherited many a good 
quality from a singularly mixed ancestry ; in fact, with a steadi- 
ness of their own, there is frequently to be found among them 
something of the quickness and adaptability of the Frenchman ; 
they are good-tempered and energetic, men of patience and 
industry, fond of hard work. While they have shown a remark- 
able progress in the agricultural art, their industrial works have 
made them rivals of many greater nations ; and the fact that 
Belgium, with her small territory of 11,000 square miles, occupies 
the fourth rank among the nations of Europe by the importance 
of her industrial production, is the best eulogy of her activity in 
the material sphere. 

In the happy development of independent Belgium, no small 
praise is due to the two sovereigns who have presided for the 
last sixty years over her destinies. When the National Congress 
in 1 83 1 sent a delegation to the Castle of Claremont in Surrey to 
offer the crown to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, they could not 
have made a better choice. With his experience of men and 
things, his deep knowledge of politics, his tact and wisdom,. 
Leopold I. proved a most beneficent ruler to Belgium, while 
being a model of a strictly constitutional king ; it is well remem- 
bered to what a prestige he had attained in the council of 
European sovereigns ; he was a great friend of this country, and 



266 National Life and Thought. 

•enjoyed the sincere veneration of Queen Victoria. King Leopold 
II. has been worthy of his father, being, like him, a popular and 
enlightened sovereign, faithful observer of his constitutional duty, 
impartial between the parties, and deeply attached to his people. 
His earnest desire of opening new fields to Belgian interests 
contributed to bring him to undertake his great enterprise in 
Africa, which will ever ensure him a noble fame before all 
nations. 

Last year, in the House of Commons, 1 the name of Belgium 
happened to be mentioned in debate, and Mr. Gladstone pro- 
nounced these words of sympathy, which were gratefully noticed in 
Belgian circles : "There is not in all Europe a monarchy of more 
untainted honour ; there is not a government of more beneficent 
operation ; there is not a spot on the map where constitutional 
principles have been more faithfully and more beneficially 
observed, from the time when that remarkable man, Prince 
Leopold, was chosen the first King of Belgium, down to the present 
moment, when the present King of Belgium has for so long been 
engaged in treading in the steps marked out for him by his 
father to the immense benefit of his country. (Loud cheers.) 
I believe I am speaking the sentiment of the whole House when 
I say that that monarchy has our sympathy (cheers) ; and should 
the necessity arise, it would, I believe, on all proper occasions 
have our support." (Renewed cheers.) 

We could not look for a more appropriate conclusion than such 
a precious testimony. Belgians could see in it, and in the way 
the graceful utterance was received, a fresh proof that this 
country will remain for them, as she has been, a powerful friend 
and steady guardian of their independent position. 

1 29th May 1889. 



XV. 
SWITZERLAND. 

HOWARD HODGK1N, M.A. 

PROBABLY a very small proportion of the many thousands of 
English tourists who every year spend their summer holiday 
in Switzerland have realised that there are other interests in that 
little land beside the grandeur of its mountains, the verdure of 
its valleys, the beauty of its lakes, and the excellence of its hotels. 
These last are the interests that engross the multitude, while the 
soul-stirring history of the Swiss Confederation, and the pure and 
simple democracy of its existing political institutions are, in 
general, suffered to remain unnoticed ; yet knowledge such as this 
could not fail to add to the enjoyment of the traveller in that land 
of freedom. The picturesque scenery of Switzerland is world- 
famed ; but the history of Switzerland is as picturesque as its 
scenery. And the present Constitution, or rather Constitutions, of 
Switzerland are as interesting to the student of politics as is its 
history to the historian. 

That history may be said to have begun about six hundred years 
ago, when, in theyear 1291, the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwytz, 
and Unterwalden entered into a perpetual alliance for mutual pro- 
tection against their foes. But before summarising their history 
from that day to the present, I propose to explain shortly what it 
is that now gives a peculiar interest to Switzerland, from a poli- 
tical point of view. 

Switzerland is a very small country, one of the smallest in 
Europe; and there are some people who are tempted to ignore 
it, to say that so small a country can achieve nothing that is 
great and glorious and worthy of observation. They think upon 
it only as the holiday ground of Europe. 

It is a small country, with an area about a quarter of that of 

England and Wales, a population of under three millions — about 

the same as Yorkshire — and hemmed in on west and north and 

■east and south by the four great European powers of France, 

267 



268 National Life and Thought. 

Germany, Austria, and Italy. Yet it has an interest quite apart 
from that of any other small European country such as Belgium 
or Portugal; for, small as it is, there are within it twenty-two (or, if 
we count the three divided cantons, twenty-five) separate states, 
generally called cantons, having distinct sovereign powers of their 
own, which they can exercise free from the control of any other 
state or authority whatsoever, thus differing entirely from our own 
counties, and being very similar to the separate states of the 
American Union, only with a more strongly-marked individuality ; 
and these separate and independent cantons are now allied 
together under one of the most perfect systems of Federal 
Government that has ever been devised. 

Professor Freeman gives the following definition of federal 
government: "A union of component members, where the 
degree of union between the members surpasses that of a mere 
alliance, however intimate, and where the degree of independence 
possessed by each member surpasses anything which can fairly 
come under the head of mere municipal freedom." 

The present Swiss Constitution dates from 1874, in which year 
there was a total revision of the previous Constitution of 1848. 
The object of the Constitution is declared to be : " To ensure 
the independence of the country against foreign nations, to main- 
tain internal tranquillity and order, to protect the liberty and 
rights of the confederated citizens, and to increase their common 
prosperity." 

The cantons are declared to be sovereign in all respects so far 
as their sovereignty is not limited by the Federal Constitution, so 
far, that is, as the cantons have not given over a portion of that 
sovereignty to the Federal authority, which is elected by them. 

Now, what are the matters — the attributes of sovereignty — 
which these five-and-twenty free and independent states have volun- 
tarily relinquished, and deposited with the Federal power at Berne ? 

The most important of these are : — 

1. The right of declaring war and concluding peace, and of 
making alliances with foreign states. But the cantons still retain 
the right of concluding conventions among themselves on admini- 
strative matters, and treaties with foreign states on commercial 
matters and frontier relations. 

2. The control of the army ; though each canton may maintain 
a very limited number of troops of its own. 

3. The entire postal and telegraph service is also under direct 
Federal control. 






Switzerland. 269 

4. The Confederation has the sole right of coining money ; 
•determines the system of weights and measures ; has the monopoly 
of the manufacture of war powder; and (recently) the manu- 
facture and sale of spirituous liquors. 

5. In order to meet the expense of carrying on the Federal 
Government, it has the sole right of levying export and import 
duties ; but it levies no direct taxation. 

6. Certain other matters which strictly ought to be under the 
control of the cantons, have been placed under the control of the 
Confederation, because they affect the whole or a considerable 
part of Switzerland, such, for instance, as the preservation of 
forests, dykes for keeping in the big rivers, railways, and great 
through roads, etc. 

But you will see that, in spite of this subtraction from cantonal 
.sovereignty, a great deal of sovereign power is left to be exercised 
by the cantons themselves. The government of the cantons is 
the rule, the government of the Federal body the exception ; and 
in all other matters than those which by the Constitution have 
been entrusted to the Federal body, each of these little Republics 
is as sovereign, as independent, as England or France, or any of 
the great powers of Europe. 

The following are some of the matters in which the cantons are 
still supreme : — 

1. All civil and all criminal law; and the administration of 
civil and criminal justice. 

2. Cantonal and local police. 

3. Land laws. 

4. The organisation of the communes, or small local communi- 
ties or districts. 

5. The organisation of education. 

6. The levying of taxes, except on imports and exports — for 
instance, graduated or proportionate taxation both on property 
and income — has now been imposed in a majority of the cantons. 

You will see that these are very large and important powers 
which the cantons still exercise; and yet consider the smallness of 
some of the communities which exercise them. Two of them 
have a population of 12,000 each. Thirteen, or more than half 
of the cantons, have a population of under 100,000 each. 

I have used the words " the powers which the cantons still 
exercise;" for you must understand that these powers are not new 
but old. Indeed, the tendency of modern times has been and 
still is to curtail these powers, not to enlarge them. 



270 National Life and Thought. 

This will be seen more clearly if at this point we take a brief 
retrospect of Swiss history. 

It may be said to have begun, as already mentioned, towards 
the end of the thirteenth century. 

At that time Switzerland did not exist as a country, but the 
germs of it were to be found in three little communities living in 
three valleys, which ran down to the Lake of Lucerne, and in the 
forests and mountains surrounding them. The names of these 
three districts were Schwytz — from which the whole country after- 
wards took its name — Uri, and Unterwalden, which, even earlier 
than the time we are speaking of, was divided for some purposes 
into the half-cantons Upper and Lower Unterwalden. No one 
but the Emperor rightfully claimed any sovereignty over the 
people ; and, thanks to the remoteness and inaccessibility of their 
homes, their life was an independent one. But the house of 
Hapsburg had considerable territorial rights within these districts, 
by virtue of which the Hapsburgs were constantly endeavouring 
to increase political sovereignty; and when in 1273 Rudolf of 
Hapsburg himself became Emperor, there was naturally much 
confusion of rights, which would have been much more serious but 
for that prince's high qualities. 

On his death, in the year 1290, the people of Uri, Schwytz, and 
Unterwalden met, and, in self-defence, concluded a perpetual 
alliance, agreeing on oath to protect each other, their persons, 
families, and goods, against all comers, and to aid each other in 
council and in arms, and each state put its common seal to the 
document. From this date they styled themselves Confederates 
or Eidgenosun {i.e. companions of the oath). They did well. 
Albert of Hapsburg became Emperor in 1298, and, according to 
tradition, he came into Switzerland anxious to incorporate the 
three cantons with Austria, and on their refusing he sent among 
them Austrian bailiffs or stewards (notably Gessler and Landen- 
berg), who exercised a despotic power over them, oppressed and 
maltreated them, levied exorbitant taxes from them, and imprisoned 
them for the slightest offences, real or imaginary. 

This treatment led to a renewal of the oath. In 1307, on the 
green plateau of Rutli, on the shores of Lucerne, there met at 
night some ten men from each of the three cantons (under the 
leadership of Steuffacher, Fiirst, and Melchthel), and with hands 
raised to Heaven they swore to live and die for the rights of the 
oppressed people, neither to suffer nor commit injustice, to 
respect the rights of the Count of Hapsburg, but at the same 



Switzerland. 271 

time to place some check on the arbitrary acts of his tyrannical 
bailiffs. 

They fixed the 1st January 1308 for the execution of their 
design. Before that date, however, Gessler, as tradition goes, 
had been killed by William Tell. When the day arrived the plot 
was successful ; Landenberg was driven from the country ; the 
castles of the bailiffs were destroyed or taken ; and without loss of 
blood the liberties of the cantons were restored, and once more 
their alliance was renewed. 

I must refer to Schiller's " Wilhelm Tell " for a poetical descrip- 
tion of the somewhat obscure and traditional events of these years. 
But history soon takes the place of tradition. Albert had been 
slain in 1301, and in 13x5 Leopold of Austria invaded Switzer- 
land Avith a large army, and for the first time the League proved 
its power in battle by completely defeating him at Morgarten, and 
driving forth from their country the Duke and the remnants of 
his vanquished army of nobles. This struck a great blow at the 
exercise of political rights by the house of Hapsburg. Henceforth 
the Confederates are known as Swiss. And the next few years are 
marked by several important additions to the League. As early 
as 1332 Lucerne joined them, and the four forest cantons made a 
perpetual alliance. In 1351 Zurich, threatened by Albert of 
Austria, appeals for help to the Confederates, and then joins the 
Confederation. In the following year Glasus and Zug are both 
admitted, and in the year 1353 the League was greatly strengthened 
by the accession of Berne. For more than a century these eight 
cantons alone formed the Confederation. The sixty years from 
1291 to 1353 had worked wonders in this little land. 

But the Swiss had not yet won for themselves freedom. 
Europe had not yet realised the united strength of these little 
Republics which were thus growing up in their midst; while 
the dwellers in mountain and in valley were still suffering 
oppression at the hands of the tyrannical and tax-collecting 
Austrian land-stewards. This oppression led to further resist- 
ance; and the destruction of the castle of Rothenburg by a 
party from Lucerne was the immediate cause of the advance 
of young Leopold of Austria, whose avowed object was to 
crush for ever the rising vigour of the Confederates. He was 
nephew to the Leopold defeated at Morgarten. Leopold's 
hostility was primarily against Lucerne ; but the other cantons 
(apparently with the exception of Berne and Zurich), remember- 
ing their oath, decided to join their forces in resisting him. He 



2.J2 National Life and Thought. 

advanced, 5000 strong, against Sempach, which lies ten miles north- 
west of Lucerne, intending, after having subdued the town, to pass 
•on and attack the city. 

But on the morning of the 9th July 13S6 he found opposed to 
him the army of the Confederates, numbering barely 2000. By 
Leopold's orders his cavalry dismounted, and, closing their ranks, 
they formed with their shields one solid iron wall, which was 
defended by their long lances. Against this wall the little Swiss 
army poured itself in vain, but with most disastrous results to 
itself. All seemed lost, when, according to tradition, which is 
neither proved nor disproved, Arnold Von Winkelried of 
Unterwalden, declaring that he would open a way for free- 
dom, cast away his weapons, and, rushing forward, gathered into 
his breast as many of the Austrian spears as his arms could 
encircle. This device opened a space in the great armed wall of 
the enemy through which his comrades could enter. The Swiss 
victory was complete. Leopold and hundreds of his Swabian 
knights were slain, and Winkelried, by his heroic self-devo- 
tion, won for himself the everlasting gratitude of the Swiss 
people. 

Two years later (1388) the Austrians were again defeated, this 
time by Glasus, almost without help, at the battle of Noefels. In 
the early years of the next century we find Appenzels bearing the 
chief brunt of the Austrian attack. Assisted by the Confederates, 
she several times successfully repulsed Frederick of Austria,and the 
latter proposed and concluded a fifty years' peace with the Con- 
federates, in the year 141 2. This peace was broken not by 
Austria but by the Swiss, who were urged on by the Emperor 
Sigismund, also by the Church, to attack Frederick's territory in 
Aargau. In spite of the protestations of many of the cantons, 
who condemned this breach of faith, Berne, and at length all the 
Confederates, conquered Aargau. Berne took the greater part of 
it, and the remainder was governed in turn by the other cantons, 
except Uri, who declined, from conscientious motives, to have any 
share in the spoil. 

But, alas ! " the love of money is the root of all evil " in Switzer- 
land as elsewhere, When the Swiss had been fighting in self- 
defence and for freedom they were united. Now there were 
jealousies about this property they owned in common again. A 
few years later a disputed claim to territory led to a quarrel 
between Zurich and Schwytz. The Confederates offered to 
separate, but Zurich declined, and this led to actual civil war 



Switzerland. 273 

between the Confederates and Zurich. After much fighting and 
bloodshed peace was restored in 1450. 

Then for a time the Swiss are once more united in having to 
face the terrible attacks of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, who 
came against them with great armies. And thus united they 
defeated him in 1476 at Grandson, and took from him enormous 
spoils of gold and precious stones. And later, in the same year, 
he was once more completely defeated at Morat, and the year 
after defeated and slain at Nancy. 

But, alas ! when they were thus saved from their dangers and 
peace was restored, the Swiss quarrelled once more amongst 
themselves over the booty they had taken in war. The unsettle- 
ment caused by so much fighting led to brigandage and internal 
disorder. Many Swiss hired themselves out to foreign countries, 
to fight as mercenaries. There were disputes also between the 
towns and the country districts. The condition of Switzerland at 
this time was far from satisfactory. 

Several Diets or Assemblies of the cantons were held without 
success ; discord usually prevailed at them. The same fate seemed 
to be awaiting the Diet which was being held at Stans in the year 
148 1 ; but an old hermit, called Nicholas de Flue, suddenly came 
among them, and preached to them peace and concord. His 
venerable dignity told upon them, and harmony was restored. By 
the Convention of Stans the points in dispute were settled, and 
Soleure and Freiburg were admitted to the Alliance. The effect 
of the Convention was still further to increase the Federal 
sovereignty, and to lessen the individual power of the cantons. 

A few years later the Austrian attacks were renewed, but in 
many engagements they were successfully repulsed by the Swiss, 
whom this danger had again united. These incidents led in 1501 
to the admission of Bale and Schaffhausen, and, in 1513, of 
Appenzell, into the Confederation, which now numbered thirteen 
states, and this number was maintained until the year 1798. 

I need not dwell long on this period of nearly three centuries. 
It is not marked by great victories or triumphs ; rather is it marked 
by great internal discord, due primarily to religious wars, which 
troubled Switzerland, as they did most other countries of Europe, 
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for both the old 
faith and the new had many adherents in Switzerland ; due also 
to present revolts and political disturbances, for the town states, 
such as Berne, Lucerne, etc., treated the rural population as sub-, 
jects, in this differing from the old country cantons of Schwytz, 

s 



274 National Life and Thought. 

Uri, Unterwalden, etc., where the whole population were on the 
same equal terms. The fact that these thirteen states held together 
during all those troublous times, is itself a strong proof of the 
national feeling in Switzerland. That there was so much discord, 
arose from the want of a strong central executive. Much of the 
remaining territory which now forms part of Switzerland, was at 
that time connected with the Confederation, either as subject 
states, such as Aargau and Thurgau, or bound to it by treaties, 
such as the Grisons, the Valois, Geneva, etc. 

The spirit of the French Revolution reached Switzerland, and 
there was a rising of those who were being denied the privilege 
of citizenship. In 1798 France interfered, and having defeated 
the Swiss, she put an end to the old Confederation, and intro- 
duced one united Republic for the whole of Switzerland, which 
destroyed the old sovereignty of the cantons, and was most dis- 
tasteful to the majority of the Swiss. It could not last long. In 
1803 Napoleon drew up a form of Constitution, called the Act of 
Mediation, which nearly restored the old Confederation, except 
that a more regular Constitution is given to the Diet, and that six 
new cantons were admitted, viz., St. Gale, the Grisons, Aargau, 
Thurgau, Ticino, and Vaud. They had been subject or allied 
cantons ; now they exercise sovereign rights as members of the 
Confederation. 

Then came the fall of Napoleon, but the great Powers recog- 
nised the neutrality of Switzerland, and in 1815 approved of a 
new Constitution, known as the Federal Pact, and three more 
cantons, Valois, Neuchatel, and Geneva, making twenty-two in 
all, were admitted. 

The Federal tie was firmly maintained; there was a Diet for 
general affairs, meeting in alternate years at Zurich, Berne, and 
Lucerne. Each canton had one vote, but there was little unity 
of purpose. 

It was found that the central authority was not strong enough 
to cope with agitation and discord throughout the country. The 
cantons were too independent. The deputies they sent to the 
Diets were delegates only, and could only vote according to 
their instructions, and these instructions were varied and conflicting. 

The spirit of revolution prevalent in Europe reached Switzer- 
land, and by the year 1847 the Constitutions of nearly all the can- 
tons had been modified and made more democratic. It became 
evident that a change in the general Constitution was necessary. 
It was precipitated by religious troubles. 



Switzerland. 275 

Unfair treatment, as it was thought of the Catholics, especially 
in Aargau, led to seven Catholic cantons forming a separate 
League, known as the Sonderbund, in the interests of their 
religion. This was clearly a violation of the Federal Pact. A 
committee of the Diet, to whom the settlement of the disputes was 
intrusted, declared the Sonderbund dissolved, and by a short 
three-weeks' campaign they soon reduced the seceding cantons to 
submission. 

Then followed the work of drawing up a Constitution, that of 
the United States being largely taken as a model. Two months 
•sufficed to complete it. The new Constitution was at once 
accepted by thirteen-and-a-half cantons, and was finally promul- 
gated with the assent of all in September 1848. 

It was a compromise. A stronger central power was created. 
This gave compactness to the country, which better secured 
peace both without and within; but it lessened the sovereignty of 
the cantons. 

In fact, a new epoch in Swiss political history began in the year 
1848. The lower form of Federal Government, known as a system 
of Confederated States, had previously existed. Now the full idea of 
'Federal Government is for the first time introduced, which Pro- 
fessor Freeman describes as " the most artificial production of 
.political ingenuity." 

According to Professor Dicey, "The sentiment which creates a 
Federal state is the prevalence throughout the citizens of more or 
.less allied countries, of two feelings which are to a certain extent 
inconsistent — the desire for national unity, and the determination 
to maintain the independence of each man's separate state. The 
aim of Federalism is to give effect as far as possible to both these 
sentiments." 

Both these sentiments were prevalent in a marked degree in 
Switzerland at the time of the Sonderbund war, the latter being 
perhaps the stronger ; and effect was successfully given to both 
of them by the new Federal constitution which was then 
introduced. 

There were now for the first time to be two Legislative Cham- 
bers, together composing the Federal Assembly, in which the 
•supreme authority of the Swiss Confederation is vested, subject 
nevertheless to the rights of the people and the cantons as 
hereinafter mentioned. 

Of these two Chambers, the National Council is elected propor- 
tionately to the whole population, one deputy being chosen for 



276 National Life and Thought. 

each 20,000 inhabitants, and it represents the Swiss people as a 
whole. 

The Council of States, on the other hand, keeps alive the sove- 
reignty of the cantons ; for each canton, great or small, sends two 
members, and the mode of their election (whether directly by the 
people or by the Cantonal Parliaments) and the terms of their 
office is fixed by each canton individually. The deputies of the 
National Council, on the other hand, are all elected for three 
years ; and every Swiss, on attaining his twenty-first year, is qualified 
to vote. 

These two Chambers generally sit separately. But sitting 
together, they constitute the Federal Assembly, and have power 
to elect the members of the Government, or Federal Council, as- 
it is called, and to choose the chief Federal officers. 

Such is the general outline of the present Swiss Constitution. 
There is one striking fact to be drawn from the history of this- 
country, which should not be without its lesson to us, namely,, 
that in Switzerland the constitutional movement throughout 
several centuries has not been one of disintegration, but of 
gradual cohesion, not of weakening the central authority, and; 
giving greater powers to the separate governments ; but the sepa- 
rate communities, starting with practical independence, have been 
gradually giving up more and more of their authority to the 
central power, and especially has this been so in the last 
century. 

Up to 1798 the Federal tie binding the thirteen cantons was 
a very loose one, not amounting to much more than an alliance. 
Other cantons were bound to them only by alliances. Then came 
the short-lived Helvetic Republic, which in 1803 gave way to Napo- 
leon's Act of Mediation, when a regular Diet, but with limited 
powers, was created. Then came the Federal Pact in 181 5, and 
also with a regular Diet ; but the central authority was still nearly 
powerless. This has had to give way in 1848 to a much 
closer union of the cantons in a Federal Constitution. And again 
in 1874 a revised Constitution binds them still more closely 
together. Even since that date there have been some partial 
revisions ; and in the matters of marriage laws, factory laws, the 
sale of spirits, and patent laws, the Confederation has been en- 
croaching upon the cantons. And it seems certain that more power 
must gradually come into the hands of the Federal authorities, for 
convenience demands it ; the diversity of legislation in different 
cantons, on common subjects, such, for instance, as bankruptcy 



Switzerland. 277 

.and crime, being clearly productive of much inconvenience and 
even confusion. 

Professor Freeman's axiom that Federal Government must be 
•closer combination of States, not a separation of United States, is 
certainly true of Switzerland. 

Personally one cannot help feeling sympathy for the smaller 
and older States who, having been nearly sovereign for the last 
five or six centuries, desire still to retain as large a portion of that 
sovereignty as is compatible with a strong, united Switzerland. 
But the Constitution is on the whole popular — both with those who 
desire further centralisation, and think it will come gradually, 
and with those who, favouring the sovereignty of the cantons, 
think this is fairly secured to them under the Constitution. This 
is the view of the late Sir F. Adam, British Minister at Berne, to 
whose most interesting book on the Swiss Confederation I am 
indebted for much material of this lecture. 

The Constitutions of the several cantons, the manner in which 
they exercise those sovereign powers which remain to them, differ 
^enormously; and subject to certain Federal restrictions, each 
canton regulates its own constitution according to its own devices. 
In olden times, the form of government in some of the cantons, 
such as Berne and Lucerne, though republican, was intensely 
aristocratic, the power being in the hands of a close corporation 
or a few patrician families. In others, such as Zurich and Basel, 
though all the townspeople had a voice in the government, the 
country people were excluded. But the three original cantons 
and the other rural cantons had all along been purely democratic. 
Now, however, the sovereignty of each State must, according to 
the Swiss Constitution, reside in the people of that canton. 

But that sovereignty is very variously exercised. In some can- 
tons the people elect a representative Pact, it may be for two 
years, as in Geneva ; or for three, as in Zurich ; for four, as in 
Vaud; or for five, as in Freiburg. These Parliaments not only 
pass laws, but in most cantons choose the members of the Govern- 
ment. In some cantons, however, such as Zurich and Zug, the 
members of the Government are chosen directly by the people. 

I need not, however, weary you with more examples of such 
diversity. Enough if I call your attention to one of the most 
striking and one of the most picturesque features of Swiss 
political institutions, namely, that in some of the smaller cantons 
there is no need for any representative Parliament at all. There 
are half-a-dozen of these communities so small, numbering only 



278 National Life and Thought. 

from 12,000 to 50,000, that instead of electing a Parliament to- 
pass laws and vote taxes and choose ministers, the sovereign 
powers of the canton are directly exercised by all the adult male 
citizens assembled once a year in some historic spot in meadow 
or in market-place, and there they transact all the necessary busi- 
ness for themselves. 

In the spring of 1886 I had the privilege of being present at 
two of such gatherings — one at Stans, the capital of Nidwalden, and 
the other at Altdorf, the capital of Uri. 

In both cases the proceedings of the day were begun by High 
Mass in the Church, which was attended by the Landamman, or 
Prime Minister of the canton, and the remaining members of the 
Government, and other officials, all of whom in Nidwalden wore 
their robes of office. After Church the officials went in procession, 
accompanied by a military guard and a band of music 5 to the 
place of meeting; for in both the cantons the actual meeting, 
place is in a green meadow a mile or two out of the town. In 
Uri there is nothing special to mark the spot; but temporary 
hustings are erected, forming a large ring, in the centre of which 
sits the Landamman and the Land-schreiber, or Secretary of State. 
In Nidwalden, on the other hand, there is a permanent earthwork 
enclosure, of course with no other roof than the sky, surrounded by 
a fine grove of chestnut trees, just then in their freshest green. 
But in both cases the more distant surroundings, the green chalet- 
covered slopes in the foreground, and giant mountains rising in 
the background, whether the snow-capped heights of the Busin 
or the rugged outline of Pilatus, formed an amphitheatre which it 
would be hard to equal for beauty or for grandeur. 

Passing over the brief and less exciting scenes at Stans, I will 
give a short outline of the proceedings at the Landesgemeinde of 
Uri. My companion and I obtained without difficulty front seats 
on the hustings. 

The Land-haibel, or chief of the ushers, whose duty it is to count 
the voting, opened the business by a declaration as to the 
qualification of electors. Then the Landamman, Herr Maheim r 
made his retiring speech. He addressed the Assembly as " Dear 
fellow-countrymen" (Liebe mit Landlente), and told them that 
meeting them here at the end of his year of office, his heart was, as 
ever, full of love for their little Heimatland (Home-country). He 
then spoke of the great evils of spirit-drinking, which had been on 
the increase in Switzerland, referred with satisfaction to the recent 
Federal law (already alluded to), which placed the manufacture 



Switzerland. 279 

and sale of spirits under the control of the Federal authorities, and 
concluded this portion of his speech by appealing to his fellow- 
citizens to live a self-controlled and moral life. 

He then proceeded to recall the famous memories of early 
times, and to make this, the five-hundredth anniversary of Sem- 
pach, the keynote of his speech, which continued somewhat as 
follows : — 

" Faithful and dear fellow-countrymen," said he, " on the 9th 
of next July/Jt will be just five hundred years since the famous 
battle of Sempach was fought, which secured to us our liberties. 
Important as were the League at Riitli and the fight at Morgarten, 
that which was achieved by them was but dim and insecure. 
Later, in the same century, came young Leopold of Austria against 
the four forest cantons to crush them; but they went forth to 
meet him, and Uri sent out her illustrious Conrad der Fraven. 
It was a glorious and complete victory which the Confederates 
achieved over a much more numerous enemy ; and it is only since 
that famous battle of Sempach that our League has been strong, 
respected, and feared. Dear, faithful fellow-countrymen, we hold 
our Landesgemeinde to-day on the same spot where our ancestors 
decided to fight for their liberties and for ours. Let us follow their 
great example. It is true that the character of our warfare has 
changed ; we have peaceful work to perform instead of waging war. 
But we have our vigour and our existence to maintain, and it is only 
through a childlike devout trust in God that we can do this. Let 
future generations speak well of us too ; and though they will not 
say that we have won victory in battle, may they be able to say of 
us that we have preserved our religion and maintained the State, 
and have handed down to them the same glorious inheritance. 

"Let us now ask God's assistance, and that He will guide our 
work aright. Let us each say five Ave Marias and five Pater- 
nosters." 

He ceased. The whole assemblage, numbering probably 
upwards of two thousand, then rose to their feet, bared their 
heads, and prayed in silence. During the time thus occupied 
in prayer, which could hardly have been less than two minutes, 
and seemed much longer, perfect stillness prevailed amongst that 
great throng. The scene was a most impressive one. 

Then followed the regular business. The Landamman was 
re-elected, so were most of the other retiring officers. Most of this 
business was formal, but the matter became animated when a 



28o National Life and Thought. 

certain Herr Miiller, whose turn it was to retire, begged not to be 
re-elected. A member of the Government receives as salary only 
3f. (or 2S. 6d.) for each time the Government meets to 
transact business. It is therefore not surprising that men should 
often shrink from rather than seek after the labours of office. But 
a man chosen by the people to fill a certain office in the State is 
bound to serve. Hence Hcrr Midler's difficulty. He pleaded 
the claims of his family, said he must consider their interests, and 
felt that he could not attend further to public affairs. Two others 
were against their wishes nominated to fill the office, and the 
names of the three unwilling candidates were successively put 
before the meeting. There was a close contest ; three times a 
show of hands was demanded, but eventually Herr Miiller was 
re-elected. And thus for three years more this poor man must 
needs neglect his family to serve the State. Would that such 
unselfish patriotism were common among our own politicians ! 

The exciting business of the day was yet to come, viz. the 
consideration of the Government Bill, which besides other fiscal 
amendments, introduced progressive taxation, both on the capital 
value of property, and on income, — the tax on income increasing 
from a quarter per cent, on the lowest incomes to two per cent, 
on the largest. 

The debate was animated. It was clear from the cheers and 
cries of disapproval what the issue would be. But if members 
were on the side of the tax, one could not help thinking that the 
arguments were against it, but perhaps this was prejudice. One 
witty opponent said he thought the people did not understand the 
principle of progression. He would explain. Suppose a cobbler 
made a pair of boots for some one whose foot was six inches long, 
and then another whose foot was twelve inches long ordered a pair 
of boots, and the cobbler, instead of making the second pair twice 
as long as the first, made it three times as long, that would be 
progression, that is the principle of progressive taxation. 

The Landamman wound up the debate, supporting, of course, 
his own measure. It was carried by an acclamation, and by an 
immense majority of votes, and this brought the meeting to a 
close. It had lasted about four hours. 

If it be thought that this is too hurried a way for determining 
important questions of State, it must be borne in mind that a few 
weeks previous to the meeting a printed official programme is 
sent to every citizen. The laws to be proposed are set out in 
full, a list of the offices to be filled, and details of the taxes to 



Switzerland. 281 

be asked for. Thus the citizens have ample opportunity of 
considering and discussing among themselves in private the 
questions upon which they will shortly be called upon in public 
•to decide. 

I trust you will not think too much time has been devoted to 
those Landsgemeinden. They are not the important feature in 
Swiss political life to-day ; but, on the other hand, they are of great 
historical and antiquarian interest. They are a perfect survival of 
the oldest institutions of our race, and probably represent what 
used to take place in the early year of our own country. Through 
storm and revolution, through wars without and discords within, 
these primitive institutions have been maintained, and form an 
integral part in the practical working of the Swiss Confederation at 
the present day. 

The striking feature in Switzerland is to be found in the 
extraordinary success which so far has attended the close form of 
Federal Government which has existed since 1848, a period of 
more than forty years. 

It has on a move made Switzerland strong and united, as the 
smaller Switzerland used to be when, in the fourteenth century, she 
had to contend against the might of Austria, and has thus enabled 
her to take up a stronger position towards the nations without, and 
to prevent discord .between the various cantons within ; and yet 
through all it preserves the identity, the peculiarities, the local 
sentiments of the canton. 

Little Catholic Nidwalden, with its 12,000 inhabitants, holds 
its yearly Landsgemeinde. Her great Protestanfneighbour Berne, 
with more than half a million inhabitants, has the complete 
machinery of a representative Parliament. The most extra- 
ordinary differences of language and religion exist among the 
cantons of Switzerland. Some German cantons are all Catholic, 
others practically all Protestant, others half and half. In Berne, 
a Protestant canton, we find both Germans and French. In 
Freiburg, a Catholic canton, we find both French and Germans. 
Ticino is Roman Catholic and Italian. In the Grisons, where the 
religions are about equally divided, we find a preponderance of 
German, but also Italian, and the old-fashioned Romansch and 
Ladin languages. Again, some of the cantons are violently 
Conservative, other advanced in their Liberalism. Some are almost 
wholly pastoral and agricultural, others have a large manufacturing 
-and urban population. Truly, then, the Swiss may claim for 
their Constitution a great success, when without destroying the 



282 National Life and Thought. 

individualism of the cantons it effectually and amicably binds^ 
together such contrary and diverse elements. 

But it is not only in this successful binding together of diverse 
elements that the Federal Constitution has achieved a great 
success. Both it and the individual constitutions of the majority 
of the cantons satisfy the two requirements of good government 
laid down, which I think we may safely adopt. In the preface 
to the Constitution which he framed for Pennsylvania, William 
Penn stated that in his view the perfect form of government was 
one " when the laws rule, and the people are a party to those laws." 

Let us see how far these two tests apply to Switzerland. The 
laws rule in Switzerland, because the people who made the laws 
naturally expect them to be obeyed, else where were the good of 
making them. And they intrust the administration of those laws 
to a government which is elected for a definite term of years and 
holds office independently of the subsequent approval or censure of 
the electing body. This is true whether of the Federal Council, 
which, as before said, is elected for three years by the Federal 
Assembly, or of the governments of individual cantons which are 
similarly elected for a term. If the Federal Government 
proposes some measure which is rejected by the Assembly, that 
measure does not become law ; but the Government accepts the 
rejection, it asks for no vote of confidence, nothing ensues in the 
shape of a ministerial crisis, nor does it dissolve the Assembly, 
for it has no power to do so. The Government having been 
elected for a fixed term, remains at its post, and everything goes 
on as before. The effect of this is to make the Swiss Government 
during those three years that it lasts a strong Government. And 
the Republican Swiss, like the Republican Americans, know well, 
what we in monarchical England seem too often to forget, that a 
strong executive is absolutely essential to the good government of 
any country. 

Bearing upon this, there are some further points about the 
Swiss Federal Council which are well worthy of note. Their 
salaries are small, only ^480 a year each. It is an almost 
universal practice to re-elect the members of the Council when 
their term of office expires, provided, of course, that they are 
willing to remain in office. There have hitherto been only two 
exceptions to this practice. The country therefore does not lose 
the services of a capable, honest, and devoted administrator 
because his own political views happen just then not to be in the 
ascendant. This rarely is an excellent principal. 



Switzerland. 283: 

It follows almost as a corollary from the last proposition that men> 
of different political views sit and work amicably together in the 
same Council. They may take strongly divergent views on individual 
questions. It has even happened that two of their body have 
risen in succession to support opposite sides in the debates in the 
Assembly (which they are permitted to address, but of which 
they are fiot members), and yet they will work harmoniously 
together all the time in the administration of the country. The 
majority in the Council generally belong to the same party as the 
majority in the Assembly. But the majority in the Assembly 
does not exercise its strict rights; there is a certain feeling of fair- 
play which leads them to concede the principle that other parties 
should at least be represented in the executive government. 

Would that such a state of things existed in England, that our 
politicians might, especially when in opposition, forget the petty 
claims of party for the welfare of our common country ! Would it 
not be for the benefit of the whole United Kingdom if the 
Government thereof could be intrusted for a term of years to 
good and capable men and administrators of whatever party. 
We should eliminate from either party its less able and less trusted 
members, and we should not have the ablest members of the 
opposition perpetually thwarting the ablest men in office. 

We see, then, that in Switzerland "the laws rule;" and more 
than that, there is no other country in which it may so safely be 
said that "the people are a party to those laws." 

I have already explained how purely democratic is the com- 
position of the Federal Assembly ; and have stated that " in it the 
supreme authority of the Swiss Confederation is vested, subject 
nevertheless to the rights of the people and the cantons as. 
hereinafter mentioned." We now come to consider what are the 
rights of the people and the cantons which impose limitations on 
the power of the Federal Assembly. They are to be found in the 
peculiar Swiss political institution known as the Referendum t 
which means "the reference to all vote-possessing citizens of the 
Confederation for acceptance or rejection of the laws passed by 
their representatives in the Assembly." 

If any charge is proposed in the Swiss Constitution, there must 
be a Referendum ; but if any ordinary laws or general resolutions- 
are passed by the Assembly, a Referendum takes place only if 
such be demanded either by 30,000 citizens or by eight cantons. 
When a change in the Constitution or any new law or resolution 
is put to the Referendum, such change or law only comes into- 



284 National Life and TJwught. 

force if a majority of the citizens participating the vote pronounce 
in the affirmative, and if a majority of the cantons are also in 
favour of the change. 

Thus the new Constitution of 1874 was agreed to by 340,000 
citizens against 198,000; and by fourteen-and-a-half cantons in 
favour, and only seven-and-a-half cantons against. Now 
supposing that twelve of the smaller cantons had voted against 
the Constitution, and ten of the larger in favour of it, the reform 
would not have been carried out, even though a majority of Swiss 
citizens were in its favour. In this way something of the old 
sovereignty of the cantons is secured. The voting is very simple. 
All that the voter has to do is to deposit in the ballot-box his 
voting-paper with either Yes or No written upon it. 

This ultimate reference of important decisions directly to the 
people secures a more purely democratic form of government 
than anything that can be obtained by the necessarily defective 
system of representation. It gives back to the Swiss people 
something of that direct share in legislation which they possessed 
before representative Parliaments were introduced, and which the 
six small cantons still possess in regard to their own affairs, as we 
saw when speaking of the Landsgemeinde. 

The result of the system is said to be excellent. It makes each 
citizen feel his own individual influence and responsibility; it 
strengthens national and patriotic feeling ; extreme measures on 
one side or the other have no chance of passing, and measures that 
are passed naturally carry greater weight, having thus the direct 
sanction of the majority of citizens. Radicals like the system, 
because it is essentially democratic. Conservatives have become 
its earnest supporters now that they find it acts as a check upon 
hasty and radical law-making. 

Not only does this system prevail in the Confederation, it 
prevails in most of the cantons also. The cantons which have a 
Landsgemeinde do not need it ; the others acquire many advan- 
tages of the Landsgemeinde by means of the Referendum. 

In seven of them the Referendum is compulsory ; that is, the 
people must express their opinion directly on all important matters 
as defined by the Constitution. Thus, in all these seven cantons, 
any single expenditure above a certain limit, or increased annual 
expenditure, must be submitted to the popular vote. In Berne the 
limit is ^20,000. In Schwytz it is as low as ^2000, or ^400 
additional per annum. 

In seven other cantons there is an optional Referendum only ; 



Switzerland. 285 

that is, that a certain number of citizens have a right to demand 
the Referendum. 

Freiburg is the only canton where there is no Referendum as to 
laws or expenditure ; but even there it prevails as to the revision 
of their Constitution. 

It is evident that the Referendum, both federal and cantonal, 
affords to the Swiss people a certain guarantee that they cannot 
be governed by laws to the making of which they have not 
themselves been parties. 

There are many other phases in the political and social life of 
Switzerland to which time will only permit a brief allusion. 

Among such are the Communes, the units of political life in 
Switzerland, which may be considered as the base from which first 
the canton and then the Confederation is formed. They are purely 
democratic. Two or three times a year a general assembly is 
held of all male citizens belonging to the commune. The assembly 
elects an administrative council of six or eight members, votes the 
communal taxes, and decides important questions. The council 
so elected looks after the roads, the police, the poor, public 
instruction, and so forth. Most of the communes have property, 
especially woods and pastures, in high Alps ; and this communal 
property is also administered by the council in conformity with the 
wishes of the commune. 

It is this communal life which is, in some respects, the strength 
of Switzerland. By it the Swiss nation has been trained from its 
infancy — and each individual Swiss from his infancy — to habits 
of law-making and administration. And when we add to this the 
training which so large a proportion of the Swiss have for centuries 
had as members of cantons — especially in the old free cantons — 
it is not surprising that, at the present day, every Swiss is born a 
statesman, and that the Swiss as a nation are pre-eminent in the 
art of government. 

With a population about two-fifths Roman Catholic, and three- 
fifths Protestant, it is not surprising that the Constitution of 1874 
declares liberty of conscience and belief to be inviolable, and 
guarantees the free exercise of worship within the limits compatible 
with public decency and order. It must be admitted, however, 
that this limitation is somewhat strictly enforced. The order of 
Jesuits is not allowed in Switzerland ; new convents cannot be 
founded ; and in some cantons no religious processions are allowed 
to take place in the streets. Considering this strictness against 
Roman Catholics, we can well understand that the Salvation 



■2 86 National Life and Thought. 

Army should so often be interfered with as being likely to cause 
.a breach of the peace. All these limitations on religious worship 
.are remarkable in so free a country as Switzerland. They no 
doubt arise from the remembrance of so much religious discord in 
the past ; a discord perhaps due to the fact that the Swiss are 
earnest in their religion, and feel their differences keenly. 

The Swiss are the best taught nation in the world. The Con- 
stitution makes primary education compulsory, and it is given at 
public expense ; but each canton has its own system. In some 
cantons Catholic and Protestant children receive religious instruc- 
tion together in the communal schools ; in other cantons it is given 
separately. The best sites in town or village are chosen for the 
schools, and public money is ungrudgingly spent on education. 
As a result, every child in the Confederation, not mentally 
incapacitated, is able to read and write. 

But one must not prolong the description of all these various 
phases of life in Switzerland, or tell of her marvellous success in 
manufactures and in agriculture — a success obtained nevertheless 
by the utmost skill and industry, and insufficient to obviate a 
considerable annual emigration to America. This is no place for 
a detailed description of the little Republic. My aim has been 
rather to give you a brief outline of its history and development, 
especially in connection with the existing forms of government; 
and to rouse, if it may be, some enthusiasm such as the Swiss 
feel in their country and its institutions. 

They are all proud of their history — which, nevertheless, as we 
have seen, is not common to all the cantons; they delight in 
celebrating centenaries of its important events, and yet the ances- 
tors of many of those who in 1886 were joyfully celebrating the five- 
hundredth anniversary of the battle of Sempach, suffered defeat in 
the army of Leopold. But that matters not now. These ancient 
feuds are forgotten. Federalism has done its work ; it has succeeded 
in binding together very diverse and even jarring elements, while 
preserving the sovereignty of the cantons. It has succeeded in 
enlarging the borders of Switzerland, and freedom within her 
borders has thereby been enlarged also. 

The principal object of this course of lectures is stated to be 
"to modify our insular prejudices respecting foreign countries.' 
There is no European country to whose history and institutions 
Englishmen ought to be more alive than the Switzerland in which 
they spend so many a pleasant holiday ; none in which they can 
learn better the advantages of a strong yet popular executive, freed 



Switzerland. 287 

from the tyranny of party warfare;, none in which they see better 
the full ideal of Federal government ; yet few, perhaps, whose 
history and institutions have received less attention from the 
British public. To travel for the sake of historical or political 
research is one thing, to travel for the sake of beauty of scenery 
is another, but it is nowhere possible to combine these two pursuits 
so effectually and so delightfully as in Switzerland. 

Yet who considers for a moment when he takes the boat from 
Lucerne to Fluelen, touching at Beckenried and Brunnen on 
the way, that he has in those two-and-a-half hours been in four 
successive Republics, each of them semi-sovereign and inde- 
pendent? How many of the English travellers who daily in 
summer are crossing the Brunig Pass, or winding with amazement 
through the circular tunnels of the S. Gothard railway, dream for 
-a moment that at Sarnen and at Altdorf they are passing green 
meadows where the whole manhood of a free state still yearly 
meets to choose its ministers, to vote its taxes, and to make its 
laws ? 

As one who has found intense enjoyment in the natural beauty 
of Switzerland, and has felt that enjoyment quickened by the 
study of the history and politics of her people, it is but discharg- 
ing a debt of gratitude if I have been enabled this afternoon to 
inspire some keener interest in Swiss freedom — in the story which 
tells how that freedom has been won — and in the political 
institutions under which it is safeguarded. 



XVI. 

MODERN LIFE AND THOUGHT AMONGST THE 
GREEKS. 

J. THEODORE BENT. 

I DO not propose in this lecture to confine myself to the narrow- 
limits of the kingdom we now call Greece, but to give an 
account of the condition in which we now find the whole of the 
Greek race scattered through the towns, villages, and islands on 
the Eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Somehow the en- 
thusiasm for the Greek which was so keen during the first half 
of this century, an enthusiasm which was fostered by our poets 
and our classical students, has of late years cooled down into 
something like indifference, as far as the modern Greeks are 
concerned. Theories like that of Fallermayer have been widely 
discussed, namely, that the modern Greeks are all of Albanian 
blood, and that the descendants of the old race of heroes is extinct ; 
this theory is doubtless in a measure true, on the mainland and 
in the mountainous districts it is undoubtedly the case. The 
Greeks were never a pastoral race, but gregarious, wedded to the 
sea and commerce, hence we must look for the race always along 
the seaboard, either in the big towns of the Levant, or in the 
islands to which the barbarian races never penetrated. But into 
this question of race I will not go, for it is an inexhaustible and 
unsatisfactory one; suffice it for our purpose that we have now 
existing a kingdom inhabited by people who call themselves 
Greeks, and a much larger area inhabited by people speaking the 
Greek tongue, a language much more closely akin to the language 
spoken at the beginning of our era than the English which we 
speak to-day is to the language spoken in the time of Chaucer : 
and it is a curious but well-ascertained fact that the language of 
the New Testament is much more akin to the language spoken in 
Greece to-day, than it is to the language of Plato and Demosthenes, 
that is to say, a period of eighteen centuries of turmoil and oppres- 
sion has had less effect on the language than four centuries of 
prosperity and literary activity. 

289 rp 



290 National Life and Thought. 

Let us first glance at the progress made by the present kingdom 
of Greece during its sixty years of emancipation from Turkish 
oppression. It is true that Europe is somewhat disappointed with 
the position it has taken up amongst nations. It was expected to 
develop itself like Italy has done, to become a power in the East, 
to eventually take up the reins of government in the Balkan 
provinces, with its capital at Constantinople. That is to say, we are 
disappointed that a tiny, mountainous country, without resources, 
for the most part sterile, the inhabitants of which, from long 
disuse to government, t look only to local interests, and on whom 
the idea of patriotism is only just dawning, has not as if by magic 
blossomed forth into a ruling power. We might as well set Ireland 
adrift by itself in the middle of the Atlantic, and expect it to rival 
the British Empire, as expect the tiny Greek kingdom, with its two 
million inhabitants, to take her position as a power in the East. 
On a close examination, however, I think Greece, especially now 
that it is becoming more united in a common cause, will be seen 
to have done everything that any one in reason could have expected 
of it. The first of the many difficulties it had to contend with 
was want of union. Every town and every island scrambled at 
the outset for its own separate advantage ; patriotism was a 
quantity entirely unknown to them ; then again, a national Greek 
failing was that everybody sought to be a politician, everybody 
talked, and nobody dared to act. The outcome of this is still evident 
in Athens, the smallest capital in Europe, yet the one which pro- 
duces the greatest number of daily newspapers in proportion to its 
size. Governments rose and fell with a rapidity that would be 
startling even in a South American republic, until at last one 
man, by his firmness, his ability, and his uprightness, has at last 
stemmed this disastrous current, and is moulding Greece into a 
steady system of practical politics. This man is Mr Tricoupis, 
who spent most of his youthful days in England. He was educated 
at Harrow, and made himself thoroughly master of our system of 
legislature, and under his guidance it is being brought to a suc- 
cessful issue on the old soil of Hellas. 

Let us glance at the capital. Athens is all modern, and the 
pity is that King Otho, out of sentiment, reconstructed it where it 
is. If he had kept the ancient city with its Acropolis as a museum, 
and built his capital at the Piraeus, it would have been infinitely 
superior, both for those who wished to pursue commerce, and 
those who wished to study archaeology. The rows of white 
houses, the trim, clean streets, the public buildings and palaces, 



Modern Life and Thought amongst the Greeks. 291 

are all the growth of the last half century. In 1832, as Professor 
Jebb tells us, 'the inhabited dwellings in Athens consisted of 
a few wooden houses, one or two more solid structures, and the 
two lines of planked sheds which formed the bazaar ; ' and when 
Otho became the first King of the Hellenes, not a single house 
in his capital could be made fit for his accommodation. Now 
the town contains a king's palace, an university, which, I think, 
is one of the most perfect and elegant modern buildings I have 
•ever seen, three national museums, free schools, hospitals, boule- 
vards of fine marble palaces, squares and streets, and a population 
of nearly 60,000. 

No country, in proportion to its size and wealth, has spent half 
as much on archaeological research as Greece has done during 
the last twenty years. Excavations on a most elaborate scale have 
been conducted on the Acropolis and elsewhere ; large museums 
have been constructed to contain the treasures found in these 
excavations, and those found by French, German, and American 
excavators, for the Government now forbid the exportation from the 
country of any works of art • and no country has spent more on 
education. Education would seem to be one of the first instincts 
•of returning life amongst the Greeks, an instinct even still more 
remarkable in unredeemed Hellas, where the difficulties attend- 
ing the advance of education have been infinitely greater, and 
which we shall presently discuss at greater length. Young Greeks 
swarm in the universities of Germany and France, where they 
have gone to complete the already sound education given them 
by their university at home, and it surprises all travellers who 
visit Athens to see the multiplicity of book shops in the city. 
Translations of the best known foreign books, histories, poems, 
and novels written by modern Greek authors, and the evidence 
of an exceedingly high state of mental culture pervades the 
country. Mentally, the Greeks have made the most rapid strides 
during their period of freedom ; they are a clever, far-seeing race, 
amongst whom the brain power is far in excess of the physical 
energy. 

The development of railways in Greece is one of Mr Tricoupis' 
pet schemes, and it is one which will have much to say to the 
future of the new kingdom. The railway along the northern 
coast of the Peloponese, from Athens to Patras, has already been 
constructed, bringing the capital into closer communication with 
the west; but the great line of rail which is, in five years, to 
unite Athens with the main systems of Europe, has only just 



292 National Life and Thought. 

been commenced this winter by English engineers. It will pass 
up the classical valley of the Kephissus, and cross the mountain 
ridge which divides the plain of Attica from Bceotia by the Phyle 
Pass; thence it will run to Thebes, skirt Parnassus by Livadia, 
Daulia, and the Lake of Orchomenos, penetrate into the plain of 
Thessaly by the pass of Thermopylae, and reach the Turkish 
frontier fifty miles beyond Larissa. This will leave a short gap 
between the Greek system and the line down to Salonica, and 
when this is finished it is confidently hoped that the line to Athens 
will be the great overland route to the East, and that the harbour 
of the Piraeus will succeed to the traffic which has for so many 
years found its headquarters at Brindisi. 

The town of Hermoupolis, on the Island of Syra, in the Cyclades, 
is, perhaps, one of the most interesting specimens of modern Greek 
commercial enterprise. During the Turkish days, it was the seat 
of a Roman Catholic mission, and was under the direct protection 
of the Kings of France. At the time of the revolution, Greek 
merchants and labourers flying from Chios, Psara, and other 
points where the Turks perpetrated wholesale acts of cruelty, 
took refuge here, as on neutral ground. Syra in itself is a mere 
barren rock, and at that time had not more than 1000 inhabitants 
on it. By degrees the Greek merchants gathered round themselves 
the nucleus of trade, and even before the declaration of inde- 
pendence, Syra was a prosperous place. In 1825, the first two- 
storied house was built; a few years later a barn-like church 
and barn-like storehouses were erected on the beach ; Luke Ralli 
christened the infant town Hermoupolis, and after the war of 
independence, Syra grew with the rapidity of the mushroom towns 
of the western hemisphere. To-day it has a population of 25,000 
souls, fine warehouses, factories, a theatre, a town-hall, and 
quays. Its harbour is one of the busiest in the Levant, it is the 
central depot of the eastern telegraph in this part, and of 
the Greek Steamer Company ; most of the outward and home- 
ward bound steamers call here, and, next to Athens and Patras, 
it is the most imposing place within the realms of modern 
Greece. 

From these points it will be seen that the little kingdom of 
Greece has done well during its half century of emancipation, 
but its resources are so limited that, unless it can get accession 
of territory, it cannot hope to do better. ' Without Crete, Epirus, 
and Macedonia,' writes one of the best modern Greek politicians, 
' Greece has no future ; ' and wealthy Greeks, the representatives 



Modern Life and Thought amongst the Greeks. 293 

of Greater Greece, we might call them, have recognised the impos- 
sibilities of their country by withholding their support from it. 
They continue to live in Constantinople, England, France, Egypt, 
and elsewhere, carrying on their commerce and enriching their 
adopted countries, a race as scattered almost, and as commercial, 
as the Jews; but at the same time they are by no means un- 
patriotic. Far from it ; large sums of money find their way into 
proper channels for the education and elevation of the Greek 
nation still in bondage. They realise the fact that education is 
the one weapon with which to fight Turkey, and to check the 
advance of Russia in the East, and when it is a question of money 
for the building of schools for Greeks in remote parts of the 
Turkish Empire, the purse-strings of Greater Greece are always 
open. Let us now glance at the component parts of the Turkish 
Empire, Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia, and the islands. Here 
it is that we shall find the majority of the Greek-speaking popu 
lation, and all, until quite lately, living in a state of the grossest 
ignorance. Here has been a field for generosity far more de- 
serving than the self-supporting institutions of free Hellas, and 
into this channel we shall find that the money of rich Greeks 
flows ever freely. 

During the dark ages of oppression, the Greek Church was the 
only community which contributed in any degree towards educa- 
tion ; the monastic bodies and the village priests, too, did a praise- 
worthy work in keeping alive the Greek nationality and the Greek 
religion, but this was almost all they could do. After the revolu- 
tion there came a thirst for a more extended system of education, 
the spirit of patriotism was aroused, and central societies were 
formed at Constantinople with a view to elaborating some scheme 
for the elevation of the masses of the Greek population, scattered 
through the Turkish Empire. For many years the progress made 
towards this end was exceedingly slow, owing to the keen opposi- 
tion of the Turkish Government, and it was not till 1861, when 
the Porte found itself in a hopeless condition of finance, that the 
Greeks were able to step in and literally purchase from their rulers 
concessions for schools, and a concession for the existence, in the 
very centre of the Ottoman empire, of a central educational body. 
At first a so-called " central college " was formed by the Greeks of 
Constantinople, which drew up for itself a wide line of action, and 
established as the basis of its work the patriotic motive of raising 
the Greek masses out of the depths of ignorance into which they 
had fallen during the Ottoman rule. But this college failed, for 



294 National Life and Thought. 

reasons which we need not here discuss, and finally handed over 
its programme to a Society, which rejoices in the somewhat high- 
sounding title of the "Hellenic Philological Syllogos," and which 
three years ago tried to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, but 
the Turks would not permit the demonstration. 

To this Society is alone due the great advance in education 
which has been made amongst the Greek population in the 
Turkish dominions during the last twenty years. The influence 
which has been effected by it over the masses is only now be- 
ginning to be felt, and if its area of usefulness develops with 
similar rapidity during the ensuing quarter of a century, little will 
be left to be desired on the score of education. 

This Society was not, as its name would almost lead one to 
imagine, a literary society founded by a collection of literary men 
— far from it. The men who in 1861 joined together with a view 
of developing and spreading education amongst their compatriots 
were, for the most part, bankers, shopkeepers, doctors, and priests, 
not one of whom had at that time any special predilection for 
literature or art ; and up to the present time it is from these classes 
of society that the ranks of the Syllogos are filled. Hercules 
Basiades, for example, who was for many years president of the 
Society, is by profession a medical man. 

The Society is distinctly patriotic, and has for its chief object 
the instruction in letters of a vast population, of whom, fifty years 
ago, only five per cent, of the males, and one per cent, of the 
women, could either read or write. 

The branches of the Society are manifold; there is the 
archaeological branch, pure and simple, presided over by its 
own chairman and directed by its own committee. This branch 
has done admirable work in the preservation of ancient monu- 
ments in and around Constantinople. Then there is the scien- 
tific branch, likewise under the direction of a separate committee, 
which has done all it can towards the advancement of scientific 
research, and towards the amelioration of the sanitary condition 
of one of the most unsanitary cities of Europe. Thirdly, we 
have the financial committee, which looks after the internal 
working of all the branches of the Society ; this branch has the 
onerous duty of soliciting and collecting subscriptions, and of 
attending to the demands made on the Society's resources by 
the other committees ; but the most active and useful branch 
is the educational, the committee of which has adopted the 
work which the former college set itself as its own, namely, that 



Modern Life and Thought amongst the Greeks. 295 

of spreading education through the Levant. It is with this 
branch of the Society that we are now more especially in- 
terested, so we will at once set out its scheme, which is as 
follows : — 

(a) The spread of education amongst the orthodox peoples 
of the East, paying especial attention to female education, 
whereby the mothers of the future Greek race may be enabled 
to undertake the instruction of their children from their earliest 
infancy. 

(b) This object is to be brought about by the erection of boys' 
and girls' schools wherever necessary, and by assisting already 
established schools to increase their usefulness. 

(c) Special attention is to be paid to the publishing and distri- 
bution of good educational books for the use of these schools. 

(d) Efficient schoolmasters and schoolmistresses are to be 
sent from Constantinople to superintend these schools in re- 
mote districts of the empire, where the same cannot be locally 
provided. 

(e) And lastly, the Society is to endeavour to establish colleges 
for the better education of the lower clergy, whose immediate 
work it is to cope with ignorance and superstition. 

The carrying out of this scheme has naturally called for the 
greatest liberality on the part of the wealthier Greeks, and the 
substantial success which has been already achieved during the 
short period of twenty-five years is the greatest testimony that 
can be found to illustrate their genuine patriotism. 

Throughout the period of four centuries of darkness which 
succeeded the fall of the Eastern Empire, there always existed 
amongst the Greek-speaking population an attempt at education 
solely conducted by the clergy; their schools were known as 
"simple" or "elementary schools," and the education therein given 
to the boys who attended them was. limited in the extreme ; 
specimens of these " simple " schools may still be found in out- 
lying districts, where the central educational system has not yet 
penetrated. The classes are generally held in the vestibule of the 
church, or in a house close by, and are only opened at those 
seasons of the year when the priest, who is usually the master, 
is not obliged to be working in his fields. The scholars learn 
the letters of the alphabet from written tablets, and when they 
can read correctly a verse of the Psalter, they are sent home to 
their work, and to forget the very shape of letters. Some few 
only are permitted to prosecute their studies until they are able 



296 National Life and Thought. 

to read the Psalms and the Gospels ; two or three at the most 
ever attain to such a pitch of excellence that they are allowed to 
read a portion of the service in church. When such a paragon 
of intellect adorns a family, the grateful parents and relatives 
will make a great feast in honour of the occasion ; they will 
bring handsome gifts to the instructor as a testimony of their 
gratitude, and the successful pupil is considered to be so superior 
to the rest of his family, that he takes the name of Diakos or 
Deacon, which name is treasured in his family for generations. 
If such a youth feels inclined to take up literature as his pro- 
fession in preference to the tilling of his ancestral fields, he may 
proceed to the higher branch of writing, and from being the 
secretary of the schoolmaster in his capacity of village scribe, 
he may attain to the proud rank of schoolmaster and village 
scribe himself. 

It is on such material as this that the Syllogos had to build its 
educational structure. Of course in some of the larger towns 
there existed schools of a higher class ; these were at once incor- 
porated into their scheme, and this was done by constituting 
them as the heads of branch brotherhoods and societies incor- 
porated with and constructed on the same principle as the 
Syllogos at Constantinople. 

Fifteen years after the foundation of this Philological Society, 
there sprang into existence no less than eighty-four of these 
independent branches, scattered all over the empire, which recog- 
nised the educational committee in the capital as their central 
head. By degrees, in some towns — such as Adrianople, for 
example — reading-rooms were opened and libraries formed, and 
the several branches of archaeology and science were added to the 
already existing educational one, so that the constitution of the 
mother society was reproduced at Adrianople in all its depart- 
ments. 

Now there are many more of these branches, and the work is 
steadily advancing. Some of these offshoots have taken to them- 
selves appropriate names ; that at Philippopolis was known as 
"The brotherhood of good works," that at Smyrna is called 
"The Homer," that in Patmos "The regeneration." It is re- 
quired of each of these societies and brotherhoods that they 
shall send periodical accounts of the work done and of the neces- 
sities of each place for the beneficial extension of the system; 
and in the journal, which the Central Society publishes periodi- 
cally at Constantinople, side by side with accounts of archaeo- 



Modern Life and Thought amongst the Greeks. 297 

logical discoveries and scientific research, we read the minutes 
of the Educational Committee, which proves at the same time 
the extent of the generous help already given, and the immense 
field that there is for future development. 

We will now proceed to take examples of the educational work 
that is in progress from various points of the Turkish Empire. 
Where the monastic resources are sufficient, and where help is 
not urgently required, matters are allowed to pursue their old 
course. On the island of Nisyros, for instance, we found the 
Archimandrite Cyril, of the monastery of the Holy Virgin of the 
Cave, the chief mover in the diminutive society on this island ; 
besides acting as banker for the peasants and issuing cardboard 
notes, an inch and a half square and of the value of one penny 
each, signed by his name, as a medium for exchange, and, 
besides paying for a doctor, who attends the poor people free of 
charge, he has likewise, with the income of the monastic pro- 
perty, established a boys' school and a girls' school at Mandraki, 
the chief village on the island, which are presided over by efficient 
teachers, who have been sent out thither through the agency of 
the Society; the books of instruction have likewise been pro- 
vided from the same source. But all this has been done at the 
expense of the monastery, which is a prosperous one; and to 
realise the real benefit of religious institutions on mankind, and 
the readiness with which even effete monastic institutions work 
for the advancement of the Greek race, one ought to travel in 
the out-of-the-way corners of the Turkish Empire. 

In Greece proper, the work of the monasteries is practically 
over, since the Government has taken upon itself the sole super- 
intendence of education, and is alone responsible for the im- 
provement of the people. What monasteries once were, and 
what good they have done, can now only be realised in Turkey ; 
the smaller ones, as the one in Nisyros, for example, have pro- 
vided education for the masses ; the larger ones, as Mount Athos, 
have provided instruction in the higher branches of learning, and 
act as universities ; and it is a question open to much doubt, as 
to whether the Greeks have benefited by the transfer of educa- 
tion from the priests, who have acted for ages as their protectors 
from annihilation and barbarism, to the Government schools ; in 
Turkey, as we have seen, they provide for the better education 
of the clergy, and, if this can be effected, the priesthood will 
continue as the natural instructors of their flocks. 

On the neighbouring island of Telos, which is inhabited by 



298 National Life and TJwugJit. 

semi-barbarous Greeks, living in a state of shocking ignorance 
and superstition, the monastery, in a similar fashion, has of late 
years commenced to work for the good of the people. Five 
years ago, the monks decided to expend ^25 per annum on the 
maintenance of a schoolmaster, who gave us a lamentable account 
of the ignorance he found there, and which still exists among the 
elder inhabitants ; but when we visited the school, each boy had 
in his hands the books which the Society has printed for educa- 
tional purposes, and the elder ones could read Xenophon quite 
fluently, and translate it into modern Greek. The monastery of 
Telos is far from being as rich as that of Nisyros, so the in- 
habitants have to die without physic, and the girls have to grow 
up without instruction ; but doubtless, in good time, the Society 
will step in and see to the rectification of the latter deficiency, 
for such ground as this is the field on which the Society has done 
such admirable work elsewhere. But the island of Telos is only 
thinly populated, and as remote a spot as well could be found 
from any centre of civilisation. 

In Macedonia, the Society can now boast of over twenty 
affiliated branches, the chief of which are the "Educational 
Brotherhood," at Kozane ; the " Educational Society," at Drama, 
and the "Pieria," at Naousa; and from Macedonia we may 
select an instance of the beneficial work which has already been 
carried on. At the mountainous village of Deliachova, when the 
Society commenced operations, it had most lamentable difficulties 
to contend with. Here the mother tongue of the Greeks and 
the Slavs alike was a barbarous Turkish patois ; and as none, 
even of the better class, understood Greek, the great difficulty 
was to obtain local assistance in the schools, and even those 
available would only teach when there was nothing to be done 
in the fields ; the population was considerable, and the church 
could only manage to advance ^30 a year towards educational 
purposes. This position of affairs was duly represented to the 
Syllogos at Constantinople, and, through the Society's instru- 
mentality, not only have proper Greek masters been provided, 
and the necessary educational books, but also a girls' school 
has been opened, that the future mothers of unborn Greeks 
may be able to speak to their infants in the language of their 
ancestors. 

Fifteen years ago a valuable branch of the Society was estab- 
lished at Adrianople, with the object of forming a central head for 
the furtherance of education in Thrace ; it started with a subscribed 



Modem Life and Thought amongst the Greeks. 299 

income of 30,000 grossia, partly advanced by the Syllogos, and 
partly by the richer inhabitants of the town ; ever since then this 
income has been steadily on the increase, and the advantage of a 
public reading-room and library are now enjoyed by the Greek 
inhabitants of this large city, where not so many years ago the 
exception was for a man to be able to read or write. One of the 
most flourishing branches in Thrace is at Heraclea, on the Pro- 
pontis, where previously, even though it was within easy reach of 
the capital, the greatest ignorance prevailed, and immense benefit 
has been conferred on a people who hitherto have known nothing 
of patriotism and their own nationality ; whereas now, thanks to 
the efforts of the Society, the fact has been brought home to them 
that they are Greeks, and that the main object of their rulers has 
been to keep them in ignorance of this fact. 

In Asia Minor the war against ignorance has been waged by 
the Society with equal success; here. many villages existed and 
still exist where the Greeks are only recognisable by their religion, 
the language and customs of the dominant race having been 
universally adopted ; to these villages the Society has sought, to 
the best of its abilities, to send instructors to teach the children 
their ancestral tongue. We will briefly detail the history of the 
foundation of the brotherhood of Argyropolis, near Trebizond — 
it is a peculiarly interesting one, and one which serves to 
illustrate the method adopted by the Society in carrying out their 
work. 

Argyropolis is a town in Armenia, and was founded and 
chiefly colonised by Greeks who fled thither from Trebizond for 
greater security after the Ottoman conquest ; it is situated in a 
wild and sterile district, the land around is unproductive, and 
timber is exceedingly scarce ; but the town grew rapidly in import- 
ance, and took its name from the discovery of gold and silver 
mines in the neighbourhood, and in the sixteenth century Argyro- 
polis presented the appearance of eminent prosperity — churches, 
schools, and other fine buildings were erected, and in addition to 
the wealth that accrued to them from the working of the mines, 
the inhabitants carried on a large carrying trade with the Asiatic 
tribes from the East. After the lapse of years the mines were 
exhausted, and the caravan trade from Eastern Asia found its way 
into other channels, so that, owing to loss of employment and the 
want of natural productions for sustaining life, those who continued 
to live on at Argyropolis were reduced to the greatest state of 
destitution ; the result being that, at the commencement of this 



300 National Life and Thought. 

century, the once nourishing town was reduced to a mere village, 
and of the numerous Greek families only a few hundreds remained, 
and for these there was no education, their language degenerated 
into an almost incomprehensible patois, and their only livelihood 
was gained by depredations and other acts of dishonesty. 

About twenty years ago a few of the respectable Argyropolitans, 
who had settled at Trebizond for purposes of commerce, met 
together and expressed their distress at the condition of their 
native town ; they accordingly determined on making an applica- 
cation to the Philological Society at Constantinople, which was 
then in its infancy, for assistance in forming a scheme for ameli- 
orating its condition ; and shortly afterwards, their statements 
having been duly considered at headquarters, a brotherhood of 
Argyropolitans was formed at Trebizond, and enrolled as one of 
the Asiatic branches of the Society. With the generous assistance 
which was obtained from Constantinople, this brotherhood was 
enabled to open in Argyropolis, in the year 1870, a boys' school, 
and three years later this was followed by the opening of a girls' 
school ; and now, not only in Argyropolis are there good schools, 
provided with efficient instructors and books from the central 
head, but also the brotherhood has been enabled to establish 
branch schools in some of the neighbouring villages. 

Instances of the beneficent effect of the work done by the 
Society might be enumerated indefinitely, but those I have given 
will serve to prove the progress which has been made during the 
last few years. As it at present exists, the Syllogos has representa- 
tives amongst its members of the best and richest Greek families 
in Constantinople ; it possesses a large building in Pera, containing 
a good-sized lecture hall, reading-rooms, and a library, which is at 
present unfortunately small, owing to the fact that their original 
building was burnt in the great fire of Pera in 1872, when many 
valuable books and manuscripts were destroyed. They have a 
literary reunion every week, at which scientific and archaeological 
papers, and they have periodical business meetings, at which the 
secretaries of the several sections read minutes, which are published 
in the journal under the head of Upa.-x.n7ta. 

On realising this intellectual activity on the part of the Greeks, 
one cannot help thinking that, if left to themselves, they would 
soon settle the Eastern question in their own peaceful way ; 
meanwhile, the fear of Russia, the jealousy of the Powers and 
other causes, have led politicians to give a helping hand to the 
expiring Turkish nation, whilst at the same time they distrust and 



Modern Life and Thought amongst the Greeks. 301 

despise it, and now it is Western Europe, and England more 
especially, that is the greatest check to the development of 
Greater Greece. We call ourselves humane, we abolish slavery, 
we are the champions of liberty all over the world, and yet 
we support a nation which is tyrannising over the rightful 
owners of the soil to an extent that in many cases is worse 
than slavery. 

The Island of Samos has been an independent principality for 
fifty years; it has only a population of 25,000 Greeks, and the 
progress which Samos has made, and the contrast it forms to the 
neighbouring islands, is a proof of what the population of Greater 
Greece could do if left to themselves. When they obtained their 
freedom, the Samiotes were little better than mountain shepherds ; 
there was not a rich man amongst them. Now the capital Vathy, 
which has been entirely built in this period, has good houses, pre- 
senting as their frontage an excellent quay over a mile in length. 
The Samiotes govern themselves by a council of four. She has her 
own code of laws ; nowhere in the world is property safer than it 
is on Samos. The Greek prince who is sent from Constantinople 
to look after Turkish interests and collect the small tribute is 
absolutely powerless, and dare do nothing without the consent of 
the council ; if he does do so, as happened a short time ago, the 
Samiotes send him back to Constantinople in disgrace. 

An hospital has lately been opened, and an university called the 
Pythagoras, after the ancient Samiote philosopher. New roads 
are in course of construction all over the island, and at three 
different points around the coast, breakwaters are being built to 
supply the one deficiency of the island, namely, the want of 
harbourage. 

It is like going out of paradise into purgatory to cross over from 
free Samos to poor ruined Chios, which, before the war of in- 
dependence, was one of the most prosperous marts in the East. 
Of course the contrast has been intensified by natural causes, 
the earthquake and the subsequent paralysis of trade. But in 
spite of this overwhelming misfortune, no part of the Turkish 
Empire has been subjected to more tyranny than Chios. After 
the earthquake, the Turkish government magnanimously proposed 
to remit the taxes for five years. Europe heard of this, and praised 
the Turk, but Europe did not hear how the following year double 
taxation was imposed, and double was established as the rate for 
the future. I have been an eye-witness myself of this tyranny, 
more marked in the outlying villages, where the cry of the 



302 National Life and Thought. 

oppressed is not so easily heard. Some of the villagers are wild 
with hope when they see an Englishman amongst them. They 
remember the generosity displayed by our nation after the 
earthquake, and they somehow believe that to England alone have 
they got to look for help. Even now, in the ruined villages where 
relief was distributed, prayers are offered up every Sunday in the 
churches for Queen Victoria and her nation. Little do these poor 
creatures realise that it is the English nation and English poli- 
ticians who are the chief props and mainstay of their oppressors. 



XVII. 



THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. 



i 

H. ANTHONY SALMONE. 



THE present mode of thought and condition of learning in a 
great part of Turkey and the Mohammedan world may be 
considered to be in exactly the same state as it was in Europe 
some four or five hundred years ago. Notwithstanding this 
general statement, it is still true that in certain portions of the 
Ottoman Empire there have been during the past fifteen or 
twenty years rapid strides in the paths of progress and advance- 
ment. Turkey might have been at the present day equal to 
any of the great European Empires had her progress not been 
handicapped in many ways. Probably the main causes may be 
found in the want of unity amongst her subjects, and the lack of 
general education. 

There is, unfortunately, in the greatest part of the Empire, this 
lack of a national spirit, and the lack of that unity and concord 
which so much helps to raise a people in spite of opposition and 
rulers. It is because the people of Turkey have not sufficiently 
striven to find that stepping-stone to greatness, that their lot is not 
a hundredfold better than it is. 

Those who have studied the question will, I think, agree with 
me, that there hardly exists a more intelligent and more 
industrious people than those races which now inhabit the 
Turkish Empire. And it is to be hoped that with the spread 
of education and an improved administration, the sons and 
daughters of Turkey will be enabled ere long to vie With their 
European brothers and sisters. 

When speaking of European civilisation, it is impossible to 
dissociate the progress which it has wrought in the way of 
knowledge, and the improvement and development of the 
higher instincts of mankind from the customs of society which 
it has given rise to in late times. Although it cannot be denied 
that much refinement and good taste are displayed in the modern 
303 



304 National Life and Thought. 

customs of civilised Europe, still it is to be hoped that the 
Eastern races of Turkey will retain the picturesque customs of 
their forefathers. Every country has its own laws, institutions, 
and customs; and I maintain that it is far better for each race 
with the spread of education to improve that which requires 
improvement, rather than for them to adopt the customs of 
another nation which are unsuitable to their characters and 
country. So far, the introduction of European civilisation into 
the East, and particularly into Turkey, has been in reality 
productive of more evil than good. There are two reasons for 
this ; the one is, that it came too suddenly upon them ; and the 
second is, because the said civilisation was not through the 
effort and work of the people themselves, the result of this being 
that the majority of the people, instead of selecting and culling, 
so to speak, the finest flowers and immortelles, as they should 
have done, trusted to the forced and hothouse fruits, which they 
greedily ate and which disagreed with them. A great number 
learned all the vices and shallownesses of modern European civil- 
isation, and ignored all the immortal blessing, which it has created 
in the form of science, learning, and knowledge. 

The date of the first appearance of the Turks in Europe has 
never been clearly ascertained. Some assert that Turkish tribes 
were settled in Southern Russia as early as the beginning of 
Greek history. It is generally agreed, however, that they were 
known to the Chinese long before the existence of any European 
historian. 

The founder of the present Ottoman Empire was Othman, 
who reigned from 1288 to 1326. From his early youth, Othman 
proved himself to be a daring warrior, and his power grew 
gradually but surely, forming, as it were, the basis of the succeeding 
glory which fell to the lot of the Ottoman dynasty. 

During the reign of Urkhan, his son, a standing army was 
established called yeni-cheri. In common with many other 
Oriental words, this word was corrupted by Europeans into 
Janizaries. The title of "Pasha" also came into existence at 
this time, and several of the provinces were governed by them. 
The origin of the word is from the Persian Pai-Shah, meaning 
"the foot of the King." The power of the Ottoman Empire 
now grew very rapidly, and the conquest of Constantinople was 
attempted by several of the Sultans, but unsuccessfully. But in 
May 1453, Mohammed II. met with greater good fortune ; for, after 
a siege of nearly two months, Constantinople fell into the hands 



The Ottoman Emprie. 305 

of the Turks. This great victory was quickly followed by several 
important conquests, that of Servia, Peloponnesus, Trebizond, 
Kaffa, and several provinces in Asia; and in Europe, Scander- 
beg, Herzegovina, and Otranto also fell into the hands of the 
Turks. 

But the most glorious epoch in the history of the Turkish 
Empire was during the reigns of Selim I. and his son Sulaiman. 

Selim, who reigned in the year 1512 to 1520, was the first 
Sultan of Turkey who received the title of Khalif, i.e. chief of 
all Mohammedans, and successor to the Prophet. He was 
acknowledged such by the Sheriff of Mecca, after the conquest 
of Egypt and Syria, and Al-Mutawakil, the last Khalif of 
the Arab dynasties, was deposed from his rank. The Sultans 
of Turkey have been acknowledged ever since by almost all the 
Mohammedans in the world as "Amir-ul Muminin," or chief of 
the believers. Turkey possessed during the reign of Sulaiman 
the finest navy in the world, and Europe trembled before the 
•conquerors of Constantinople. 

Although the reign of Sulaiman marked the most brilliant page 
of Turkish history, the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire 
may be dated from the closing days of this monarch's life. Never- 
theless, the Empire continued to maintain her power, and towards 
the end of the sixteenth century, in the reign of Murad III., was 
still the terror of Europe. Besides European Turkey, Greece, 
and the greater part of Hungary, she possessed all Asia Minor, 
Armenia, Daghistan, Georgia, Western Kurdistan, Mesopotamia, 
Baghdad, Syria, Cyprus, Arabia, Egypt, Algiers, Tripoli, and other 
places. 

A severe blow was dealt to Turkey during the reign of 
Othman III., who, owing to the rapid rise of the power of Russia, 
was induced to declare war against Catherine II. This proved 
disastrous to Turkey. She lost several towns and fortresses, and 
her fleet was destroyed by the Russians in the bay of Chesme. 
Through the working of Russian agents, insurrection broke out 
in Greece, Herzegovina, and other parts of the Empire. It might 
be truly said that ever since that time, the troubles of Turkey 
with Russia have never ceased. 

Let us now inquire into the causes which led to the decline of 
the power of the Ottoman Empire. 

During the reign of Sulaiman I., the Turks had arrived at the 
summit of their glory, but it was an altitude that they were unable 

u 



306 National Life and Thought. 

to maintain, for from this time dates the commencement of their 
retrogression. 

Among the many factors which led to this retrogression may be 
mentioned : — 

i. A too great indulgence in luxuries. 

2. Internal factions. The Viziers or Ministers by reason of 
the continued absence of the Sultans (who were invariably at the 
head of their armies abroad) obtained considerable power. The 
direction and management of all state affairs were left to their 
charge. This aroused jealousies and intrigues. 

3. Demoralization of the army. Love of luxury becoming 
widespread, engendered love of gold. The passion which ruled 
amongst the soldiers was gain and plunder, not love and glory, or 
a sense of duty. 

The main factor probably was the baneful influence which the 
Imperial harem (the ladies) exercised. 

The progress of the Empire was also checked by the apathy of 
the rulers towards commerce and trade. They little suspected 
that liberty, wealth, and greatness are the blessings of industry. 
All conquering races that have not consolidated their triumphs 
with labour, and commerce have fallen into decay. Their fate was 
such, because they looked upon industry and trade as servile, 
trusting to the sword to gain them riches and independence. 
This was precisely the fate of Turkey. Two or three hundred 
years ago she was wealthy and powerful, feared by her enemies 
and respected by her allies. Turkey was elated with pride after 
her conquests. She thought but little of working out her resources, 
of encouraging art and commerce, and of affording to her subjects 
(whether Christians or Mohammedans) that protection which was 
indispensable to their welfare. She left to all the nations of the 
world a vast field for commercial enterprise, and a free market for 
their productions. Hence such arts, sciences, and commercial 
spirit as Turkey once possessed, were soon outstripped by the 
gigantic development and the rapid improvement of the Western 
world. The result to Turkey was a general financial embarrass- 
ment. Having lost all her arts, and most of those immense 
productions of industry which she at one time brought into the 
market, she had to apply to foreign marts for all her needs, 
exporting thither her gold and silver. 

Two distinct populations inhabit the Turkish Empire. The 
one (comprising many nationalities) is the native or aboriginal 



The Ottoman Empire. 307 

population whose lot has been, for many generations, one of 
subjection. This population is numerous, industrious, and 
intelligent, and is made up of Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans. 
The other, the dominant Turk, is an alien population, which 
looks upon industry with disdain. These two constituent elements 
of the population, productive and unproductive, contending one 
with the other, kept the country in a state of immobility for nearly 
four hundred years. The fatal jealousy and hatred which existed 
between the governing and the governed classes, together with the 
supineness of the rulers, subverted the native and caused the 
introduction of foreign industries. Hence arose two directly 
opposite political tendencies : the first, a combined foreign 
interference in all matters of internal policy ; and the second, a 
partial and selfish protection by alien powers of interests inimical 
to Turkey. Europe, for the last sixty or seventy years, by 
introducing all the products of her art and commerce, has been, 
from a material point of view, the mistress of the Turkish Empire. 
Europeans monopolised all profitable undertakings, such as steam 
navigation, postal communication, etc. Thus between the 
combined and partial interference of foreigners, and the struggle 
of the two populations, the Turkish Government has to divide its 
attention, its subjects meanwhile becoming more and more 
neglected. 

It must be remembered that there is a sharp distinction not 
only between the races, but also between the classes of the people 
in the Ottoman Empire. Many people designate any one who 
happens to have been born within the limits of that Empire as 
"a Turk." Now there are many subjects of Turkey who are as 
little Turks as Osman Digma is a Frenchman, or the Mahdi an 
Englishman. There is equally a vast difference in the customs 
and ideas which prevail in different parts of the Empire. Amongst 
the upper and educated classes of the Turks — I allude particularly 
to the Pashas and Beys who swarm in Constantinople — there are 
many who have either been brought up in the West, or received a 
Western education. These, no doubt, would be glad to introduce 
Western improvements into the Empire, but are prevented from 
doing *so by the opposition of a vast majority who are very 
conservative, and averse to modern European customs and 
institutions. 

Colleges and schools, comparable to the finest institutions of 
the kind existing in Europe, are established in various parts of the 
Empire, either by Europeans themselves or through European 



308 National Life and Thought. 

influence. The establishments of the American missionaries and 
those of the Jesuits are among their number. 

The system of native education, under which the great mass of 
the people is brought up, is still exceedingly poor, especially 
among the Mohammedans. These have their Kuttab school, 
which consists of a large dirty roOm under the care of a teacher. 
On entering one of these schoolrooms, one sees a number of 
children squatting on the floor, and rapidly swinging their bodies 
to and fro, repeating, in a monotonous chant, passages from the 
Koran. Their teacher, who probably may be dreaming of houris 
and future bliss in Paradise, corrects their exercises. 

One word as to the influence of the Mohammedan religion 
upon the life and thought, not only of the people of Turkey, but 
of the whole Eastern world. Whatever faults and evils are 
attributed to Mohammedans, it must yet be allowed that they are 
probably more sincere in their faith, and more true to the dictates 
of their religion, than the believers of any other religion throughout 
the world. A proof of this is that there are fewer Mohammedans 
converted to Christianity than followers of any other religion. 

There are a number of people who think that nothing said against 
Mohammedans is bad enough ; but impartiality requires of us to 
give Mohammedans their due. 

The Koran, it should be understood, is regarded by them not 
alone as a book of Divine inspiration. The Koran is their rule 
of faith, their code of civil and criminal law, and their universal 
directory in all matters intrinsic and extrinsic to themselves. 
Although its dictates are simple, so far as the principles of the 
doctrine go, nevertheless there is great diversity of opinion, owing 
greatly to the complexity of its language. Mohammed laid down 
strict rules as to pilgrimages, fasts, and other things to be done ; 
but it does not appear that he enumerated and enlarged upon those 
things which should not be done. Besides the Koran, they 
have a great many traditions of which some have been accepted 
and others rejected. One of these traditions, or rather legends, 
is very amusing. It runs as follows : — " At the end of time, 
when everything will be in confusion, the Prophet will appear 
to the faithful in the form of a huge sheep. Then, by a special 
miracle, his followers will be transformed into fleas, and crowd 
into the wool of the sacred sheep, and be carried by him up into 
Paradise." 

Mohammedanism has had a remarkable influence on the laws 






The Ottoman Empire. 309 

and institutions of every country into which it has spread. The 
Arabic language, the language of its sacred book, has similarly 
influenced the tongues and dialects of many nations. Turkish 
literature is by no means poor ; but it cannot be compared to the 
literature of the early Arabs. The ideas of the majority of later 
works, especially in Turkish, are borrowed from the West. 

The study of Arabic opens to the Western student a vast field 
of literary research. Let me quote the following passage on the 
subject from the pen of Mr. Bosworth-Smith of Harrow: — 

" During the darkest period of European history the Arabs for 
five hundred years held up the torch of learning to humanity. It 
was the Arabs who then 'called the Muses from their ancient 
seats;' who collected and translated the writings of the great 
Greek masters ; who understood the Geometry of Apollonius, and 
wielded the weapons found in the logical armoury of Aristotle. 
It was the Arabs who developed the sciences of agriculture and 
astronomy, and created those of algebra and chemistry; who 
adorned their cities with colleges and libraries, as well as with 
mosques and palaces ; who supplied Europe with a school of 
philosophers from Cordova, and with a school of physicians from 
Salerno." 

Before concluding my lecture, I should like to say a few words 
with regard to the relations of this country with Turkey. 

England is most assuredly the one European power whose 
relations with Turkej should be closer, and whose interest in her 
must be greater than that of any other foreign nation. The reason 
is that England possesses the greatest Eastern Empire in the world, 
the Queen ruling over a greater number of Mohammedans than 
any other potentate. Hence, necessarily, her interests are of 
unparalleled importance in the East in general, and Turkey in 
particular, because the Sultan is the Khalif of Islam, and the 
recognised head of the Mohammedan world. The Sultan should, 
therefore, be the natural ally of England. 

It would be advantageous to England to help Turkey in the 
readjustment of her internal affairs. England could win the con- 
fidence and friendship of the Eastern races by greater intercourse 
with the people, and by pointing out, in a gentle and reasonable 
way, the advantages that would accrue to them from an improved 
state of things. It is by thus proving that England is the friend 
and ally of the Eastern world, that she can constitute and maintain 
her position as the undoubted mistress of the East. 



3io 



National Life and Thought. 



The Oriental mind requires leading, not driving. One cannot 
make a horse drink, but once led to the water he invariably does 
so. Let us, then, whenever an opportunity occurs, help by our 
sympathy and our interest to lead the people of Turkey to the 
fountain of knowledge, enlightenment, and advancement. 



APPENDIX. 

WHY DOES NOT THE SICK MAN DIE? 

C. D. COLLET, EDITOR OF "DIPLOMATIC FLY-SHEET." 

THE proximate dissolution of the Ottoman Empire has been 
a fertile theme for poets, theologians, and politicians for 
more than four hundred years. Waller made it the subject of a 
poem, which he presented to James II. But the Revolution 
of 1688 swept away the Stuart dynasty, and left the descendants 
of Othman reigning at Constantinople. 

William Eton, many years resident in Turkey and in Russia, 
wrote, in his "Causes of the Decline of Turkey," that Turkey 
must very soon be overwhelmed by the Empress Catherine of 
Russia, and the followers of Mahomet be entirely driven from 
"the countries in Europe which they have usurped;" and in the 
advertisement to his fourth edition, published in 1809, he de- 
clared, of a new chapter in the book, that "it will show that the 
awful crisis I foretold is nearly arrived." 

This was in 1809. In 1807 the British fleet, under Admiral 
Duckworth, had made an unsuccessful attempt to bombard Con- 
stantinople, while another fleet, in the same year, bombarded 
Copenhagen, thus aiding Russia in the straits which both in the 
north and the south most circumscribed her power of aggression. 
In 1809, England made peace with Turkey, but in 181 2 she 
terminated her bloodless five years' war with Russia by the Treaty 
of 181 2. Then she commenced the character of the candid friend 
of Turkey, which she has ever since kept up. The Treaty of 
Bucharest (1812) robbed Moldavia of the province of Bessarabia 
which introduced Russia to the Danube, where in 1883 her posi- 
tion as one of the Danubian European Commission was finally 
and triumphantly established. 

In 1827 England's friendship for Turkey, which was manifested 
by constant advice to submit to the demands of Russia, was some- 
what disturbed by the " untoward event " at Navarino, where the 
Turkish fleet was destroyed by the combined fleets of Turkey's 
three allies — Russia, England, and France. This cleared the way 



312 National Life and Thought. 

for Russia to invade Turkey, which she did in 1828. The first 
year of invasion was far from triumphant ; the second brought the 
peace of Adrianople, on the 14th September 1829. But fraud 
assisted the Russians even more than force. Colonel (afterwards 
General) Chesney, in his " History of the Russo-Turkish Cam- 
paigns of 1828 and 1829," page 245, says : — 

"It is pretty certain that he (Sultan Mahmoud) would have continued the 
war at all hazards, had he been aware that at that moment the Russian com- 
mander, now Marshal Diebitsch Zubalkouski, had not more than from i5>ooo 
to 17,000 bayonets. A defective commissariat, and a still worse medical 
department, caused disease to commence its work as soon as the invaders 
reached Adrianople ; at a grand review which took place on the 8th of 
November 1829, and at which the author was present, there were scarcely 
13,000 men of all arms in the field." 

The British Ambassador at Constantinople, Sir Robert Gordon, 
advised the Sultan to sign the Treaty of 14th September, and, on 
the 31st October, his relative, Lord Aberdeen, despatched to St. 
Petersburg a quasi-protest, which was hidden in the archives of 
the Foreign Office till, on 30th June 1854, the House of Com- 
mons, on the motion of Mr. Layard, requested a copy of it. Only 
then was it given to the world. 

This hypocritical protest was addressed, according to the usual 
form, to the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, who was to 
read it to the Chancellor, Count Nesselrode, " and, if desired, to 
give his Excellency a copy." In it Lord Aberdeen told the Czar, 
in the most affectionate manner, that, as a matter of fact, he was 
a violator of his word, and that the stipulations of the Treaty were 
inconsistent with the desire which he had expressed for the inde- 
pendence of the Ottoman Empire. 

This protest, like Waller's poem and Eton's history, contained 
a prediction. Lord Aberdeen referred to the anxiety on the part of 
those Powers, who have always felt a deep interest in the preser- 
vation of the system " of the European balance established by the 
Treaty of Paris (1814), and at the Congress of Vienna (1815) ;" 
and he said : — 

" This anxiety must be greatly increased when, in addition to the unavoid- 
able weakness and prostration of the Turkish Power, it is found that fresh 
causes are brought into action which are obviously calculated to hasten and 
ensure its utter dissolution." 

This was twenty years after Eton's prophecy. Greece at this 
epoch became separated from Turkey, and the Mahometan in- 
habitants were expelled from Wallachia and Moldavia, to 



Why does not the Sick Man die ? 313 

strengthen by their loyalty those parts of the Empire to which 
they might repair. Turkey, however, was not " overwhelmed," 
nor were the followers of Mahomet driven across the Bosphorus. 

If we were to inquire into the details of the Crimean war, we 
should find that the Turks, after having driven the Russians out 
of the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, were 
handicapped by the assistance of England, France, and Sardinia. 

The essential agreement, between Russia on the one hand and 
the Allies on the other, is established by the despatch of Count 
Nesselrode, 29th June 1854, in which he said that, as regards 
the civil and religious rights of the Sultan's Christian subjects, 
the Czar "would be ready to give his concurrence to a European 
guarantee for these privileges;" and by the reply of M. Drouyn 
de L'Huys, in his despatch of 2 2d July 1854, in which he agreed 
that " France, Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia shall 
lend their co-operation to obtain " these privileges for the Chris- 
tians "from the initiative of the Sultan." 

This alliance of the five Powers, afterwards increased to six, by 
the admission of Sardinia, succeeded in obtaining a further separa- 
tion of the Danubian Principalities from Turkey and the exclu- 
sion from the Black Sea of the Turkish fleet, which was stronger 
than that of Russia. This was effected under the pretence that 
if was an insulting restriction upon Russia's power. Turkey 
observed the treaty religiously ; Russia armed her merchant 
vessels and mail packets, and thus compelled the Circassians to 
leave their country, whose blockade by Russia deprived them of 
the means of subsistence. Then Russia tore up the Treaty — 
running the risk of having one day to meet the Turkish fleet in 
the Black Sea, but gaining the prestige attaching to the power of 
being free from all restrictions, even when made by a solemn and 
an equal treaty. 

The gain of Russia by the Crimean war cannot be accurately 
estimated by any who are not aware of the efforts that Turkey 
was making to emancipate herself from the restrictions, commer- 
cial and otherwise, under which she laboured. But Russia had 
undermined the Turkish power in the three Danubian Princi- 
palities, and, although she had not expelled it, she was able — 
through England and France, who, with Austria, Prussia, and 
Sardinia, joined Russia in the European Concert for the regulation 
of the Principalities — to facilitate the process of disintegration. 
The war of 1877-8 accomplished the severance of the three 
Danubian Principalities, and of that of Montenegro, from the 



314 National Life and Thought. 

Ottoman Empire, and, for the purpose of their future severance, 
created the Principality of Bulgaria and the Province of Eastern 
Roumelia. 

But the effect of this disintegration has not been entirely un- 
favourable to Turkey. Roumania, which still recollects the 
devastation of the Russian armies which occupied it "like a 
cloud of locusts" in 1848-52, and which she contrasted so un- 
favourably with the contemporaneous occupation by the Turks, 
is not disposed to become a Russian province, and does not 
consider herself called on for gratitude to a Power which, as she 
now sees, deceived her into the belief that she was acting as a 
liberator. 

It is different with Montenegro and with Servia. But it re- 
mains to be seen how far Russia will succeed in her glaring 
attempts to incorporate these provinces. 

From the time that Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia were con- 
stituted, Russia set to work to unite them into a Russian province; 
but, though they have pretty nearly accomplished their union, it 
is as a Turkish province. Roumania, Bulgaria, and Eastern 
Roumelia do not yet form a flowery path for the march of the 
Russian troops to Constantinople. 

In 1688, and in 1809, and again in 1829, Turkey was about 
to be overwhelmed by Russia. Now, after 61 years, 81 years, 
202 years, in which Russia has gradually secured the aid of all 
the European Powers, the Sultan still rules at Constantinople, 
the Moslem has not been driven across the Bosphorus. 

Why have the predictions of the Christian prophets failed of 
accomplishment? Why has the diagnosis of the European 
doctors not penetrated the secrets of the Asiatic Constitution? 
Why has not " civilisation " driven " barbarism " out of Europe ? 
Why does not the sick man die ? 

Among many causes of this persistent vitality, three are pre- 
eminent. The first is the fraternal spirit of the Mahometan 
religion, which is fully embraced by the Turks. The simplicity 
of the Monotheism of Mahomet must have been a refreshing 
breeze to all senseful men whose priests were engaged in dis- 
putes about the nature of Christ, and the rank of the different 
persons in the Trinity. The Mahometan religion recognises the 
substantial equality of all Mussulmans, and the Turks know no 
hereditary rank except in the family of the Sultan. The con- 
quered Christians who accepted Islam were at once invested 
with all the privileges of the governing race. These privileges 



Why does not the Sick Man die ? 315 

included the duty of national defence. Honour and duty thus 
went hand in hand, and the purity of their morals is still evinced 
in the noble disinterestedness which encourages Turkish soldiers 
to go on serving without mutiny, while their pay is many months 
in arrear. 

The second cause has been the liberty and the self-government 
accorded to those who refused to accept Islam, and continued 
to belong to one form or another of the Christian faith. The 
usual system in the Turkish provinces, where religions are mixed, 
is to recognise the religious chiefs as the municipal rulers of 
their congregations. The archbishops and bishops of the 
Greek Church, of the Roman Catholics, of the Protestants, 
Jews, Romanist Armenians, and Gregorian Armenians, instead 
of being subject to disabilities, or proscribed the realm by 
the Government Church of Islam, as they would have been 
in this country at the Reformation, are all invested with 
authority. Of course every election has to be sanctioned by the 
Sultan, just as in England the Lord Mayor, after election, is 
presented to the Lord Chancellor for the approval of the Queen. 
But no creed is imposed on any of their churches by any govern- 
ment authority. The Christians, too, in consideration of a money 
payment, have generally been exempted from military service. 

In Greece, before the Revolution of 182 1, the organisation 
was different. In the continent, in the Morea, and in the 
islands, the communal system was more secular, and in each 
of the three the forms varied infinitely, but the principle was 
everywhere the same. The councils were elective. Henry 
Headley Parish, Secretary to the British Legation in Greece 
from nth November 1830 till May 1834, in his "Diplomatic 
History of the Monarchy of Greece" (1838), gives a chapter on 
the communal rights of Greece under the Turkish rule, which 
shows how erroneous is the ordinary opinion on that subject. 
We can afford only one extract from this chapter, which was ex- 
tracted from a Greek journal called " Le Sauveur," published 
at Nauplia in 1834, under the Royal Regency. 

' ' Each province had a Baluk Bask/, or chief of the gendarmerie, under 
the orders of the Voyvode and the provincial council. 

" The council might displace him whenever it thought proper, without 
referring to Turkish authority. 

' ' No tax of any kind, which was called for by the wants of the govern 
ment or of the country, could be levied without the express consent of the 
provincial council, as well as that of the mayors of towns, burghs, and villages. 
The mayors assessed this tax proportionally amongst the families." 



316 National Life and Thought. 

At the end of this chapter Mr. Parish remarks : — 

"Such was the simple and beautiful system of administration which the 
Greeks had enjoyed until the year 1820, and under the shade of these institu- 
tions they had advanced in population, commerce, administrative knowledge, 
and mental cultivation beyond any conquered or tributary people of modern 
times. In 1820 their merchant vessels covered the Mediterranean. When 
the revolution broke out, the merchant navy of Greece consisted of 600 vessels, 
mounting, in all, 6000 guns. The cities of Hydra, Spezia, Ipsara, Scio, and 
others were rapidly rising to the fame of the Hanseatic, Venetian, and Genoese 
Republics, when it suited the purpose of the Cabinet of St. Petersburg, for the 
third time, to revolutionise Greece." 1 

Mr, Parish says that, under the Venetian rule, the population of 
the Morea was 190,653; under the Turks, in 1820, it was 458,000. 
It was much diminished during the war of independence. Mr- 
Frederick Martin, in his "Statesman's Year-Book" for 1880, puts 
it at 743>494- 

At the conferences of Poros in 1828, under the influence of Sir 
Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the 
envoys of the three protecting Powers — Russia, France, and Eng- 
land — declared that : — 

"In the establishment of a hereditary government in Greece, it would be 
both unjust and dangerous to deprive the Greeks of the representative prin- 
ciple, for even under the Turkish rule they elected their municipal magistrates,, 
and their ' Notables ' were generally invested with the right of apportioning the 
taxes imposed by the Porte." 2 

In the process of constructing the Greek monarchy, the repre- 
sentative system was, by great exertions, planned by Russia, and 
carried on by her in conjunction with her satellites, England and 
France, very much weakened. Mr. Stillman, a celebrated Phil- 
Hellenist, who, when American Consul in Crete in 1866, gave 
considerable assistance to the insurrection against Turkey, bore 
testimony to this in an article in the " Fortnightly Review," 
November, 1880, when he said that, "under the Turkish rule the 
municipal liberty is much greater than in the kingdom of Greece." 
He draws a picture which is well worth the consideration of all 
who think that they are doing good service by detaching provinces 
from the mild sovereignty of the Sultan, and placing them under 
the bureaucratic government of some petty sovereign under 
Slavonic protection. From this article we extract the following. 
The article was written at the time that the Berlin Conference was 
adding territory to Greece in Epirus and Thessaly : — 

"As a friend of Greece, and especially as an admirer of its courageous, in- 
1 Parish's "Greece," p. 44. " Ibid, p. 74. 



Why does not the Sick Man die ? 317 

domitable, and warm-hearted people ; not blind to its vices, but knowing that 
its virtues far surpass them, if those of any people can be said to do so, I ask 
myself the question others have asked me, and will ask now — What can be 
done, if Greece is in this desperate condition, to make her fit for the new- 
responsibilities Europe proposes to bestow upon her ? The answer is in one 
word — Decentralisation — a radical change of the constitution to one on the 
Swiss plan, with the fullest administrative liberty to the commune, entire 
abandonment of the system of nomarchs, 1 re-establishment of the original 
States as provinces, and the remission of the provincial affairs to elective pro- 
vincial governments ; in short, the most complete separation of the general 
Government at Athens from the affairs of the country consistent with keeping 
a firm, federal bond, the maintenance of the army, navy, and diplomacy under 
a common direction, and, as far as possible, the removal of the central adminis- 
tration and the civil service from the vicissitudes of an ignorant universal 
.suffrage or unreasonable changes. 

" That the Government is not strong enough to bring about complete assimi- 
lation is shown by the fact that it has been obliged to leave the Ionian Islands 
in the condition, in most respects, in which it got them. It has never been 
able to establish uniform taxation, or to abrogate special laws or institutions. 
It has generally planted the seeds of great discontent when it has done any- 
thing in the way of centralisation there. In a voyage through the Ionian 
Archipelago last spring-time, I found everywhere increasing discontent with 
the Government of Athens, and a growing regret for English rule, as well as a 
contempt for Athenian law. Ten years ago I could find nothing of the kind. 
And not only from the islands, but from almost every part of Greece where I 
have been, or where I have friends, I hear the same growing complaint against 
the absorption by the Government of the liberties and prosperity of the pro- 
vinces, and the same outcry against over-centralisation. Even the poor sem- 
blance of municipal liberty is not respected, for the demarch, or mayor, though 
elective, is utterly powerless for good, as he cannot even construct a road 
without the consent of 'the Central Government, while even illegal infringe- 
ment of the prerogatives of the municipality are not uncommon. As to the 
elections, woe to the Demarch who acts against the will of the Ministry. 

" Decentralisation will remove the great objection to enlargement of the 
kingdom, and will even make it practicable to a greater extent than will be 
found possible under the present form of government. It will permit the new 
provinces to come in with their local administration unchanged ; and it is a 
curious fact that, under the Turkish rule, the municipal liberty is much greater 
than in the kingdom of Greece. There is a great and substantial danger that in 
annexing a population so large and so habituated to that particular kind of 
liberty which will be denied it by the Greek Constitution, Greece may find 
itself in the position of a gun that fires a shot heavier than itself — the gun will 
go farther than the shot. If, for instance, Crete were to come, as the Greeks 
all hope it will, into the assembly of the Greek States, and the Islanders, 
accustomed to an extraordinary amount of provincial independence, and even 
to an insular autonomy within certain limits, were to experience the operations 
of a Greek administration, with nomarchs appointed from Athens, etc., etc., I 
am certain that two years would not elapse without a revolution and a separa- 
tion. And the plain truth is, that Crete is to-day better and more intelligently 

1 The nomarchs are appointed from Athens. 



3 1 8 National Life and Thought. 

governed than the Hellenic kingdom has ever been, and is, indeed, a model of 
government for populations so situated. " 

The Greek nation has increased in population since there have 
been no Turks in Greece against whom it could rise in rebellion, 
but it is far from possessing the energy, the patriotism, or the 
habit of self-government which it displayed seventy years ago. 
The municipal liberties which the Roman and the Turkish con- 
querors respected has been destroyed by the protection of Russia, 
France, and England. 

The municipal liberty so remarkable in Greece was not con- 
fined to that country. When, in 1880, the Secret Societies in 
Bulgaria were endeavouring to eject the Greeks from the Church 
of St. Marina, in Plovdiv, they addressed letters to the Bulgarian 
villages, calling for evidence that, thirty years before, the Church 
had been constructed chiefly by the subscriptions, not of Greeks, 
but of Bulgarians. The letter commenced as follows : — 

" Call a meeting of the members of the Council of Elders, and summon to 
that meeting the old men of your village who, thirty years ago, were at the 
head of affairs in the village. You will then question them minutely, in order 
that each may recollect what you have contributed from the village towards 
the restoration of the Church of St. Marina in Plevdiv." 1 

If the spirit of the Greeks has been broken by the seventy years' 
persecution of Russia, it must be remembered that, during the 
whole of that time, Russia was supported by England, sometimes 
by design, sometimes by inadvertence. It has yet to be seen 
whether the Bulgarians will meet with a similar fate. Since the 
brigand-like kidnapping of Prince Alexander, England has not 
actively assisted Russia in Bulgaria. 

In order to appreciate the encouragement given by the Sultans 
to commerce, it is necessary to recollect the many impediments 
to commerce enacted in England, and in particular the pro- 
hibitions made for the protection of English manufacturers, and 
even agriculturalists, against the commerce of Ireland. During 
the reign of William III., it was even proposed to make it felony 
to import Irish cattle into England. 

The Hatti Sheriffs of the Sultan according liberty of trade 
to the Rulers of England, France, Venice, and Poland, are indeed 
couched in an Oriental style of imperial condescension. 

The Emperor and Conqueror of the earth, who by Divine grace 
is the King of Kings of the world, and the dispenser of crowns to 

J Turkey No. 5 (1880). Correspondence respecting the condition of the 
Mussulman, Greek, and Jewish populations in Eastern Roumelia, p. 268. 



Why does not tlie Sick Man die ? 319 

monarchs, granted them to the most glorious among the great 
Princes professing the faith of Jesus, and the most conspicuous 
amongst the potentates of the nation of the Messiah, and every 
time that the Hat was renewed it was mentioned that the exalted 
Christian potentate who had made professions of sincerity and 
friendship, had demanded and received permission for his 
subjects to come and go into these parts, "in addition to other 
special commands, to the end that, in coming or going, either by 
land or sea, in their way, passage and lodging, they might not 
experience any molestation or hindrance from any one." 

But the provisions were really liberal, and protected the 
merchants from all that petty system of annoyance by which it is 
possible to destroy the effect of general regulations. It is true 
that the custom-house officers often tried to override these liberal 
regulations, and that the merchants, through the governments, 
had to remonstrate. But the original grants of permission were 
always repeated on demand. To the number of seventy-five, 
including the repetitions, these capitulations are given in Mac- 
Gregor's Commercial Tariffs, No. 8, "The Ottoman Empire," 
published by command in 1843. 

We can give only four : — 

" No. 30. That the English merchants, having once paid the customs at 
Constantinople, Aleppo, Alexandria, Scio, Smyrna, and other parts of our 
sacred dominions, not an asper more shall be taken or demanded from them at 
any other place, nor shall any obstacle be interposed to the exit of their 
merchandise. 

" No. 39. That customs shall not be demanded or taken on the merchandise 
brought by them in their ships to Constantinople, or any other part of our 
sacred dominions, which they shall not (of their own free will) land with a 
view to sale. 

"No. 51. That the merchants of the aforesaid nation, having once paid the 
customs on the merchandise imported into Constantinople, and other ports of 
our sacred dominions, and on those exported therefrom, as silks, camlets, and 
other goods, and, being unable to sell the said goods, are under the necessity 
of transporting them to Smyrna, Scio, and other ports ; on their arrival there, 
the governors and custom-house officers of such ports shall always accept their 
teskares, and forbear exacting any further duty on the said merchandise. 

" No. 54. That the English merchants, having once paid the duties on their 
merchandise, at the rate of three per cent., and taken them out of their ships, 
no one shall demand or exact from them anything more without their consent ; 
and it was moreover expressly commanded, that the English merchants should 
not be molested or vexed in manner aforesaid, contrary to the capitulations." 

These permissions are called capitulations because they are 
heads of what is granted only on one side. They are not treaties, 



320 National Life and Thought. 

for they stipulate nothing on the part of the Sovereign to whose 
subjects they were given. 

In 1809 we made a Treaty of peace with Turkey, whom we had 
attacked without reason. Article IV. renewed what is called 
"The Treaty of Capitulations of the Turkish year 1086 (a.d. 
1675)," anc * declared that they shall continue to be observed and 
maintained as if they had suffered no interruption. 

The following is Article V. : — 

" In return for the indulgence and good treatment afforded by the Sublime 
Porte to English merchants, with respect to their goods and property, as well 
as in all matters tending to facilitate their commerce, England shall recipro- 
cally extend every indulgence and friendly treatment to the flag, subjects, and 
merchants of the Sublime Porte which may hereafter frequent the dominions 
of His Britannic Majesty for the purposes of commerce." 

The return for the restoration of the capitulations which the 
Turkish Plenipotentiary expected was that three per cent, ad 
valorem should be the highest duty on Turkish trade with Eng- 
land ; but Mr Adair said that this was not a proper thing to 
consider in a treaty of peace, but only in a treaty of commerce ; 
and he said something about its being impossible under the 
Navigation Laws. This was true, but showed the injustice of 
England. The first part of Mr Adair's argument did not prevent 
him from accepting the confirmation of the capitulations in the 
Treaty. 

There were other capitulations which, after the time of Charles 
II., were so extended that not only British merchants, but their 
descendants, are exempted from Turkish jurisdiction. This is no 
part of the reason why the sick man does not die. On the con- 
trary, it is a most important part of the European Concert or 
conspiracy against the Ottoman Empire. We must, therefore, 
quote an anecdote which shows the extent to which this abuse 
has been carried : — 

"The dragomans of the consulates go every day to the chief police office, 
and claim their respective subjects who may have been taken up during the 
night on their predatory excursions. On one occasion the British or the 
Austrian dragoman, it does not matter which, claimed a thief, who, in the 
usual course, was released. Two days later, a merchant had a large sum of 
money in his house, and, having been warned that his house was likely to be 
attacked, he applied for and received four Turkish policemen to guard his 
premises. An attempt to break in was made in the night by a band of 
burglars who did not know the house was guarded; resistance was made, 
pistols used, and two of the burglars killed. The dead bodies and the captured 
survivors were brought to the public station; and next morning, when the 



' Why does not the Sick Man die ?' ^21 

dragomans came to claim their own, the Zabtieh Pasha conducted one of them 
to the dead burglar, and said : — 

" 'There is your subject; you had better have left him in my hands two 
days ago, and he would not have had an opportunity of returning to his evil 
ways, and be in the state in which you now see him.' " x 

A people that survives such a system as this must contain a 
principle of immortality. 

Such a people are the Turks. 



1 " The East and the West," by the third Lord Stanley of Alderly, page 37. 



XVIII. 
EGYPT. 

J. c. m'coan. 

ALTHOUGH the events of the past eight or nine years — to 
say nothing of the modern fashion of Eastern travel — have 
familiarised most of us with the geography of Egypt, it 
may be convenient to introduce the necessarily rapid sketch of 
its history and present condition which is to form the subject 
of this afternoon's paper, by a brief notice of its physical area and 
limits. 

A glance at the map will show that it occupies the north- 
eastern corner of the African Continent, where it is linked to 
Asia by the Isthmus of Suez, and separated from Europe by the 
Mediterranean Sea. Its shore-line along the old historic sea 
extends from Cape Hazai'f to El-Arish, the frontier of Palestine, 
and includes the three ports of Alexandria, Rosetta, and Damietta, 
to which has now to be added Port Said, at the entrance to the 
Suez Canal. Westwards, it is separated from the Fezzan and 
Tripoli by the Libyan Desert ; and, eastwards, is bounded by a 
line drawn from El-Arish to Akabah, at the head of the Red Sea 
Gulf of that name ; and thence, enclosing the Peninsula of Sinai, 
across to the western coast of the Red Sea down, at present, as 
far as Suakim; and, on the south, by the First Cataract at 
Assouan, about 400 miles as the crow flies from the Mediter- 
ranean, or nearly 600 if measured by the windings of the Nile. 

The area thus enclosed was computed by the French survey, 
made during Napoleon's short occupation of the country, to be 
115,000 square miles; but of this only some 10,000 were then 
cultivable, the rest being rocky and desert waste. Since then, 
improved irrigation has added nearly a fifth to this arable total • 
but owing to still defective methods of distributing the river water 
— on which the fertility of the whole depends — only some 5000 
square miles are now under actual tillage. From Assouan, the 
■ old, mysterious river winds without an affluent — with, indeed, 
323 



324 National Life and Thought. 

only two farther south, from its far-away source among the Equa- 
torial lakes — down, nearly due north, through a narrow valley, 
which, though spreading at parts into spacious plains, closes in at 
others to the river's banks, and so averages a width of only about 
seven miles. Twelve miles below Cairo the great stream divides 
into two branches, which, forking north-east and north-west, form 
the great plain called, from its shape, the Delta, and empty them- 
selves into the Mediterranean at Rosetta and Damietta. The 
five other ancient mouths of the river have long ago silted up,, 
and their courses can now be hardly traced over the great alluvial 
flat and through the network of canals and lakes which interpose 
between the sea and this point. Strictly, Alexandria lies outside 
the Delta, but in common phrase the latter includes the whole of 
the cultivable land, as well east and west as within the two 
branches of the river. Few or no monumental remains of remote 
antiquity have as yet been found in this vast triangular tract of" 
nearly 5000 square miles; but it is now the most densely 
populated and, with its great port of Alexandria, the most com- 
mercially active section of Egypt. In fertility, too, it is surpassed 
by only one other — the splendid valley of the Fayoum — which,, 
formed by a deep sinuosity in the Libyan Mountains some 80 
miles south-west of Cairo, and abundantly watered by an artificial 
cut from the Nile, blooms over 700 square miles with the most, 
varied and luxuriant vegetation. 

There remain only to mention the five Oases, those 

" Tufted isles 

That verdant rise amid the Libyan wilds," 

varying in size from the Great Oasis, of 200 miles long by 20 
broad, to the small Wah-el-Sirvah, or Oasis of Amnion, famous as 
the site of the great Jovian temple and oracle, whose priests pro- 
claimed Alexander's sonship to the god and foretold his mastery 
of the world. Without these, however, the upper river valley to- 
Assouan, the Fayoum, and the Delta give a total area of about 
t 2,000 square miles, which— plus the strip of Red Sea coast 
from Suez to Suakim, and the almost "no man's" wilderness of 
Sinai down to Akaba — may now be said to form the Egypt of the 
Khedive. Less than a dozen years ago Ismail Pasha claimed 
sovereignty from the Mediterranean to the Equator, but with the 
sacrifice of Gordon at Khartoum that bubble burst ; and, although 
we now garrison an outpost at the Second Cataract, the Egypt 
proper of modern politics and trade — as that also of the Exodus 
— lies within the limits I have roughly sketched. 



Egypt. 325 

A couple of miles beyond this southern boundary of the First 
Cataract lies the sacred island of Philce, the mythical burial-place 
of the great god Osiris. To the ancient Egyptian this was the 
most sacred spot on earth, more than Mecca to the Mussulman, 
or Calvary to the Christian, and the most solemn oath he could 
swear was, "By Him — the Un-named and Un-nameable — that 
sleeps in Philce ! " The temple ruins of this gem of the Nile are 
amongst the finest in Egypt; but as they lie beyond the strict 
frontier line, they can receive only this passing mention. 

Such, then, are the present limits of Egypt proper — nearly as 
they were 6000 years ago— enclosing a cultivable area about 
equal to the square mileage of Belgium, or to that of our own four 
•counties of Hertford, Lancashire, York, and Lincoln. Yet, small 
as this was and is, in historic interest and in the measure of its 
influence on human civilisation, this Valley of the Nile transcends 
every other country in the world. Historically, it is unique. 
While China and India were still wrapped in legendary mist, and 
long before even legend began the story of Europe anywhere 
between the Mediterranean and the White Sea, Egypt had a 
settled government and an advanced civilisation. Britain and 
Gaul were covered with primeval forest, and their inhabitants were 
nearly, if not altogether, as savage as are now the cannibals of 
New Guinea and the Solomon Islands ; the semi-mythical War of 
Troy was yet 1000 years in the future, and both Buddha and 
Confucius were unborn for still 500 years later, when great cities, 
arts and sciences, an established religion, and a matured civil 
polity whose surviving monuments still excite the wonder and 
admiration of the traveller, already flourished in the realm of the 
Pharaohs. However chronologists may differ by not merely 
hundreds, but even thousands of years, certain it is that the 
antiquity of Greece and Rome is but a thing of yesterday as 
compared with the hoar antiquity of Egypt. From the Nile 
Valley it was that Greece derived the first inspirations of her art, 
her sciences, her literature ; and improving them in the light and 
fulness of her own exquisite imagination, handed them down to 
imperial Rome, whose mission it was to diffuse them over Western 
Europe. Egypt was, in fact, the cradle of the world's civilisation, 
whence, over the great " Mid Sea," spread the influences which 
even yet are operative in redeeming the farthest parts of the earth 
from barbarism. 

The historical evidence on which this claim to advanced 
civilisation in a remote antiquity rests is based on hieroglyphical 



326 National Life and Thought. 

inscriptions on the Nilotic monuments, on papyri discovered 
among their ruins, and on passages in the Hebrew Scriptures. 
On many points, of course, the knowledge thus derived is vague 
and imperfect ; but a collation of the whole authenticates Egyptian 
annals nearly up to a level with those of Greece and Rome. So 
far back, however, do these links in Nilotic history extend, that 
chronologists differ, as I have said, in fixing their commencement,, 
not by centuries merely, but by more than 3000 years — Boekh 
reckoning it at 5702 B.C., and Sharpe at 2000 B.C. ; but Lepsius' 
nearly mean computation of 3892 B.C. is generally accepted as the 
most proximately accurate ; and from that sufficiently far back 
point in the track of time, or near to it, we may date the beginning 
of the first of the five eras into which Egyptian history divides 
itself. 

How and whence Egypt herself derived the earliest germs of 
her civilisation, has much exercised and divided antiquarian 
opinion. But what seems to be the best supported conjecture is 
that, far back in pre-historic time, an Aryan migration from 
Western India, travelling from the Indus to the Persian Gulf, and 
thence along the coast of Arabia to the shores of the Red Sea,, 
found its way into Abyssinia and Nubia, and there sowed the 
seeds of arts and institutions which thence spread later down the 
narrow channel of the Nile Valley, where they took root and 
ripened into the cultured civilisation that glorified Memphis and 
Thebes long before Cecrops laid the first crude brick of Athens, 
or Abraham drove his flocks from Chaldea. This hypothesis is 
supported by the striking resemblance which is known to exist 
between the usages, the superstitions, and the mythology of the 
ancient inhabitants of Western India and those of the first settlers 
on the Upper Nile. Thus the temples of Nubia exhibit the same 
features, whether as to style of architecture or the form of worship 
to which they were devoted, with the similar buildings near Bom- 
bay. In both countries large masses of rock have been excavated 
into hollow chambers, the sides of which are decorated with 
columns and statues of men and animals carved out of the same 
stone ; and in both are found solid blocks weighing many hundred 
tons, separated from the adjoining mountain, and lifted into the 
air by mechanical methods, the secret of which puzzles the ablest 
of our modern engineers. Nor are these architectural resemblances 
the only features in common between Western India and the long 
strip of country watered by the Nile. Others of nearly equal 
historical value have been recognised by archaeologists, which 



Egypt. 327 

similarly support this conjecture of early connection between the 
two countries. 

But whatever may have been the genesis of Egyptian civilisa- 
tion, we reach its historical commencement somewhere about 
4000 b.c, near to which Manetho, a native priest who wrote in 
Greek about 300 B.C., placed the beginning of the first of the thirty 
dynasties which, with three hundred or more sovereigns, filled 
the long span of time down to b.c. 527, when the first of the five 
eras was closed with the conquest of the Persians under Cambyses. 
Agreeing with Herodotus, who visited Egypt 150 years earlier, 
Manetho — probably founding his " Chronicle " on documents then 
in existence — named King Menes as the first of the native 
monarchs who throughout that long chain of sovereignty ruled this 
Land of Egypt. To Menes or his immediate successor is ascribed 
the foundation of Memphis, at an easy day's donkey ride from 
where Cairo now stands, and the sole relic of whose long-dead 
magnificence is a prone statue of Rameses II., the greatest of all 
the Pharaohs. It is not, however, till towards the end of the third 
dynasty, some 500 years later, that Pharaonic history begins to be 
inscribed on the monuments, and that we have in them, except 
during two great gaps, definite, if not indisputable, records of what 
followed. On this authority we know that the great Pyramids of 
Ghizeh, near Cairo, were built by Pharaoh Shufus — the Cheops of 
Herodotus — who reigned conjointly with his brother during the 
fourth dynasty, any time between B.C. 3200 and B.C. 2300, as 
chronologists differently reckon. Of these oldest and grandest of 
human monuments, which by book and picture are now familiar 
to the most untravelled, I need merely say that the slightly higher 
of the two called " Great " occupies an area of eleven acres — 
about equal to that of Lincoln's Inn Fields — with a height of 480 
eet, or 127 feet higher than the cross of St. Paul's. Like most 
visitors to these colossal " memorials of the world's faith," I have 
explored the interior and climbed to the summit of the larger one ; 
but while the long crawl inwards and upwards to the mortuary 
chamber in its centre was rewarded only by the sight of Pharaoh's 
empty sarcophagus, the view from the top a hundred times repaid 
the fatigue of the ascent. Seemingly close below, though nearly ten 
miles off, lies Cairo in all its Oriental picturesqueness, its domes, 
minarets, and feathery palm-clumps rising clear and sharp in this 
most pellucid of atmospheres; behind it the range of the 
Mokattem hills, trending in broken links to the Red Sea ; north- 
wards, beyond the lonely obelisk of Heliopolis, the luxuriant 



328 National Life and Thought. 

vegetation of the Delta stretching away to the lakes that separate 
it from the Mediterranean; while east and west flows the sacred 
and mysterious Nile, dotted far into the distance with sails 
that flash in the sun ; nearer, the palm-groves that wave over 
buried Memphis; beyond these, the scattered smaller pyramids of 
Sakara and Dashour; and, farther away, the winding valley of 
Upper Egypt losing itself in the hazy distance half-way up to 
Thebes. There is, indeed, no other view in Egypt, and few in the 
world, to compare with that which delights the eye and feeds the 
imagination from this Great Pyramid top. The second of these 
huge mountains of stone is some forty feet lower, with propor- 
tionately narrower base ; but as it stands on higher ground, the 
difference in size is hardly perceptible. On the same plateau 
cluster six other smaller pyramids — the whole, it may now be 
taken as proved, forming part of the great royal necropolis of 
Memphis. They are the grandest graves in the world, but — 
despite the ingenious theories of Professor Piazzi Smyth — they are 
nothing more. 

In a sand-hollow a few hundred yards south-east of the Great 
Pyramid, stands, or rather crouches, the colossal Sphinx — " gazing 
straight on with calm eternal eyes" across the vista of seven 
thousand years, for, according to Mariette Bey, the famous French 
Egyptologist, it was already old before the stupendous gnomon of 
Cheops was built. But of this again no description need be 
attempted. From Pliny to the latest book-maker on Nile travel, 
its solemn and majestic presence has been the theme of a hundred 
pens. The prophetic rhapsody of Eothen may, however, be once 
more quoted : " Upon ancient dynasties of Ethiopian and 
Egyptian kings, upon Greek and Roman, upon Arab and Ottoman 
conquerors, upon Napoleon dreaming of an Eastern Empire, upon 
battle and pestilence, upon the ceaseless misery of the Egyptian 
race, upon keen-eyed travellers — Herodotus yesterday, Warburton 
to-day — upon all and more this unworldly Sphinx has watched, 
and watched with a Providence, with the same earnest eyes, and 
the same sad, tranquil mien. And we, we shall die, and Islam 
wither away ; and the Englishman, straining far over to hold his 
loved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and sit 
in the seats of the Faithful ; and still that shapeless rock will be 
watching and watching the works of the new busy race, with 
those same sad, earnest eyes, and the same tranquil mien 
everlasting." 

More than mere allusion to the other great monumental antiqui- 



Egypt. 329 

ties of Egypt would be beyond the scope of this paper ; and I 
need, therefore, only say that they nearly all lie south of Cairo, 
.scattered along the river from the rock-tombs of Beni-hassan to 
Abydos, Denderah, Thebes, Esneh, Edfou, and Philce — the 
shattered but still splendid memorials of a dead faith and civilisation 
Tvith which the world can nowhere else show anything to compare. 
To those who care for scholarly and picturesque description of 
nearly the whole, I can recommend no better guide than Miss 
Amelia B. Edwards's Thousand Miles up the JViile, a book which 
is most valued by those who know Egypt best. 

From reference to these relics of far-away time, it is hardly 
.a transition to return to the chronological point at which I 
digressed — the fourth of Manetho's thirty dynasties, which ended 
somewhere about 2000 B.C. The records of the fifth and sixth 
offer little that is of modern interest, except, perhaps, the fact of 
Abraham's visit to the Egyptian Court during the reign of Pharaoh 
Phiops (of the sixth), about 1900 B.C. Of the next four dynasties 
which covered some 500 years, nothing is certainly known, as the 
monuments are again silent, and Manetho's names and dates, 
unless based on papyri which no longer exist, can at best be 
-conjectural. During the twelfth it was that Joseph the Hebrew 
was "found in a pit," and was, some years afterwards, when 
" learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," promoted to be the 
prime minister of Pharaoh Osirtesen L, somewhere about B.c. 
1700. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth dynasty occurs 
another long monumental blank, during some 500 or more years 
•of which, it is believed, occurred the invasion and rule of the 
Hyksos, or shepherd kings, who were apparently of Arab race. 
These aliens were at length got rid of by a rebellion promoted by 
the native Prince Aahmes I., of the eighteenth dynasty. During this 
and the following dynasty, Egypt attained perhaps her highest point 
of civilisation. Then it was (in the nineteenth) nourished the great 
Rameses, whose colossal statue, as already remarked, is now the sole 
relic of Memphis. Seventeen centuries after this greatest of the 
Pharaohs had been interred in the superb temple which his genius 
and power had erected at Thebes, Germanicus visited that famous 
capital, and the Egyptian priests, as Tacitus relates, read to him from 
the monumental records the deeds and victories, the treasures and 
tributes, the resources and the subject realms of this great king. 
His empire stretched northward to the shores of the Caspian, 
southward beyond the Second Cataract, westward to the interior 
•of the desert, and eastward it included Arabia. His son and 



330 National Life and Thought. 

successor, Pharaoh Menephta, is generally identified as the 
Pharaoh of the Exodus. And here may, perhaps, be conveniently 
mentioned the explanation now accepted by the best modern 
criticism of the alleged miraculous passage of the Red Sea by the 
flying Israelites and the destruction of their Egyptian pursuers. 

Brugsch Bey, a German savant, who spent several years investi- 
gating Egyptian archseology during the reign of the late Khedive 
Ismail, and whom — as also the late Mariette Bey and Professor 
Maspero, along with Brugsch, the greatest of modern Egypt- 
ologists — I have had the pleasure of meeting more than once at 
Cairo, has given special attention to this subject, and has, it may 
fairly be said, demonstrated the route taken by the Israelites, and 
rationally shown how their passage of the Red Sea took place- 
There is evidence that even in historic times what is now called 
the Gulf of Suez extended as far north as, and included, Lake 
Timsah, now nearly about midway in the Suez Canal. By the 
time of the Israelites, however, it had, through evaporation and 
other physical causes still in slow operation, receded to the Bitter 
Lakes, and a shallow had been formed between those deeper 
depressions and the present northern extremity of the Gulf. Up 
south-eastwards of Lake Timsah travelled the Israelites from the 
Land of Goshen to this ford, and here, during a favourable wind 
which left it nearly dry, they crossed to the other side of the 
Gulf. The pursuing Egyptians, endeavouring to follow at the 
same point, were caught by a change of wind which swept the 
southern waters up over the ford, with the result of engulfing 
Pharaoh and his host before they could pass. That the Hebrew 
writer, full of belief in the special providence of his tribal God for 
his people, should have regarded and recorded this as a miracle 
expressly wrought in their behalf was natural enough, and the 
modern orthodox acceptance of this view has been consistent 
with — indeed necessitated by — the now generally obsolete dogma of 
plenary inspiration. But with the surrender of this, miracle in the 
matter loses its raison d'etre, and the most religious mind may well 
accept an explanation of the event which is at once sufficient, 
rational, and naturalistic. The date of it, I may add, is generally 
fixed about 1650 b.c. 

The records of the next three dynasties furnish little of 
modern interest, but early in the twenty-third Egyptian and 
Hebrew history begin to synchronise during the reign of Pharaoh 
Shishak, who, as recorded on the propylon of the great temple of 
Karnak and in the twelfth chapter of Second Chronicles, besieged 



Egypt. 331 

and captured Jerusalem about 970 b.c. His successor, Osorthen, 
is also probably the Zerah of the Bible, who was defeated at 
Mareshah by Asa, King of Judah. Again, some 350 years later, 
after various alternations of friendship and hostility between the 
two kingdoms, the twenty-third chapter of Second Kings similarly 
confirms the Theban hieroglyphs in recording the defeat of Josiah, 
King of Judah, at Megiddo, by Pharaoh Nechoh, and his own sub- 
sequent overthrow by Nebuchadnezzar. Less than ninety years 
later, the Pharaonic era virtually ended with the twenty-seventh 
of Manetho's dynasties, when, in 527 b.c, the Persians under 
Cambyses invaded Egypt, and for nearly 200 years reduced it 
to the rank of a Persian province. During most of this time, 
however, a native revolt was kept alive in Upper Egypt by the 
princes of three further dynasties until, in 350 B.C., Nectanebus 
II. was driven into Ethiopia, and with him — the very last of the 
Pharaohs — closed this longest and grandest era in Egyptian 
history, extending over more than 3500 years. 

Here, perhaps, would be the point at which to say something 
about the religion of the ancient Egyptians, which coloured and 
gave their character to the whole polity and social life of the 
nation during this long span of time. But as much has yet 
to be sketched, I must content myself with saying that it is still an 
unsolved problem whether the Egyptians believed in one supreme 
God, whose attributes were merely symbolised in their numerous 
deities, or whether the whole structure of their faith resolved 
itself into a solar myth with many ramifications. Amoun-Ra, the 
Sun god, is certainly the most ancient object of worship found 
upon the monuments ; but whether the great luminary was merely 
regarded as the visible type of a supreme and invisible deity, or 
was itself adored as the paramount divinity of an extended 
Polytheism, is what the most authoritative Egyptologists much 
dispute. Be the theological fact what it may, Herodotus 
describes the Egyptians as "extremely religious, and surpassing 
all men in the worship they rendered to their gods." But on the 
religious belief and worship of this remarkable people, as on much 
else respecting them, I cannot do better than refer any curious 
hearer to Dr. Birch's admirable Guide to the Egyptian Rooms of 
the British Museum, in which a concise but most scholarly 
statement of our existing knowledge on the subject will be 
found. 

The second, or Persian, era of Egyptian history lasted less 
than 200 years, when, in 332 B.C., the Greek era began with the 



33 2 National Life and Thought. 

easy conquest of the country by Alexander the Great. The 
mission of Egypt in the great economy of the world's history 
may now be considered to have terminated. The spirit of the 
ancient race, long a flickering flame, died out completely with 
the appearance of the great Macedonian. The nation was well 
prepared for the change. A long commercial and military 
intercourse with Greece had saturated it with Greek ideas ; just 
as the literature, art, and religion of Greece had already been 
largely coloured by the literature, art, and religion of the land 
of the Pharaohs. Hellenic colonies had sprung up along the 
Red Sea. The Thebaid had been traversed by Greek historians 
and philosophers. Greek soldiers mustered in the Egyptian 
court. Greek settlements were planted in the Delta. In fact, 
the condition of things in Egypt in the fourth and fifth 
centuries before Christ may be compared to that which, 1500 
years later, prevailed in England during the reign of Edward the 
Confessor ; so that the people in both countries underwent a long 
preparation for the introduction of a new dynasty and an alien 
government. Just as England was Normanised before the 
conquest, so was Egypt still more Hellenised before its subjuga- 
tion by Alexander. 

Of this third era of Nilotic history I have time to say little 
more than that the Macedonian conqueror introduced no violent 
changes into the laws and local government of the country. 
While garrisoning it with a Greek force, he restored the privileges 
of the priests and repaired the temples of the deities. His chief 
work was the founding of Alexandria, in B.C. 332 — a monument 
which, even if he had no other, will sufficiently perpetuate his 
name. At his death, in B.C. 322, the vast empire constructed 
by his genius fell to pieces, and Egypt fell to Ptolemy Soter, one 
of his generals, under whom the country was still further 
Hellenised. The abstract religion of the priests of Osiris and 
Pthah was dethroned, and a misty philosophical theurgy with a 
poetical mythology of Egyptian gods with Greek attributes, 
reigned in its stead. Alexandria gathered within its walls the 
learning of the age. Ptolemy Philadelphus, the second of 
this Greek line, founded the celebrated Alexandrian Library, 
encouraged the Septuagint version of the Hebrew Bible, and 
patronised the labours of the historian Manetho, already men- 
tioned. Under his two successors, the intellectual and industrial 
activity thus promoted still further expanded, and commerce 
developed until the merchants of Alexandria supplied half Europe 



Egypt. 333 

with corn, linen, papyrus, and all the rich products of the East. 
Time compels me to pass over the remaining eight of the twelve 
sovereigns of this time (three of whom were women) who ruled 
Egypt for 300 years, till we reach the last of them, the 
famous Cleopatra, whose beauty and passion — as wildly recipro- 
cated by the great Roman — wrought ruin for herself and Antony. 
With much of her history Shakespeare has familiarised all 
readers of our tongue ; and I need say nothing, therefore, to 
remind any one of how, after beguiling Julius Caesar himself, 
she next, after his death, threw the magic of her beauty and her 
address over Mark Antony, or of how, after her cowardice or 
treachery had lost him the battle of Actium and the dominion 
of the world, he followed her to Alexandria, and, there for love 
of her, found death on his own sword. Shakespeare makes her 
in turn kill herself by an asp-bite, to escape the humiliation of 
figuring in a Roman triumph ; but, in strict history, there is no 
proof of how she ended her wild and passionate life by her own 
hand, b.c. 30. 

With the death of Cleopatra, Egypt ceased to exist as an 
independent kingdom ; and, except during the brief interlude of 
a second Persian occupation, was for 670 years ruled as a province 
of the Empire by Roman prefects. Although disturbed by several 
native revolts, the Romans, with their usual energy, largely 
developed the revenue and resources of the country, until it 
became the rich and abounding granary of the Empire. But the 
chief modern interest of this period lies in the rise and growth of 
Christianity in Alexandria, where a fierce warfare was maintained 
during the third and fourth centuries between the partisans of 
the new faith and the decaying influences of Paganism. Then 
followed conflicts as bitter beween the victorious Christian factions 
themselves, one swearing by Arius, and the other by Athanasius 
(the latter, by the way, not being the author of the creed which 
goes by his name). In a.d. 379, the Emperor Theodosius gave 
its official deathblow to the old native religion by an edict 
prohibiting the worship of idols, and ordering as many of the 
temples as had not already been converted into Christian Churches 
to be closed. And thenceforth the splendid fanes with which the 
piety and the magnificence of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies had 
crowded the banks of the Nile, fell into the decay in which the 
modern tourist finds them. But the old religion died hard, and 
for more than a century later numbered amongst its adherents 
most of the learned and scientific classes, and the students of the 



2 34 National Life and Thought. 

schools of philosophy for which Alexandria had become famous 
One of the best remembered incidents of the persecution which 
was waged against these was the savage murder — at the instigation 
of Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria — of the beautiful Neo-Platonist 
philosopher, Hypatia, the daughter of Theon the mathematician, 
and familiar to us all as the heroine of Kingsley's fine novel that 
bears her name, — one of the thousand historic illustrations that 
between so-called Christian and Pagan fanaticism there has never 
been much to choose. 

With its conversion to Christianity, the history of ancient Egypt 
may be said to close. Over its later annals, until quite modern 
times, I must pass rapidly. In a.d. 640 the Greco-Roman 
dominion came to an end with the invasion and conquest by the 
Arabs, under Amrou, the lieutenant of the Caliph Omar, the 
second successor of Mahomet. The conqueror offered the 
Prophet's usual terms to the vanquished — conversion, tribute, or 
•the sword. A large proportion of the Coptic (or old native) 
population, whose Christianity was only skin-deep, accepted the 
first, and readily embraced Islam, while the remainder and the 
Greco-Romans elected to pay tribute. To this great apostasy of 
Christian Copts was in a few years added a large Moslem immigra- 
tion from east and west ; and thus, besides the ruling caste, chiefly 
Arabs of pure blood from the Hedjaz, was formed the great 
labouring class whom we call the fellaheen, and who now number 
nearly four-fifths of the whole population of Egypt. Of these, the 
majority, especially in Upper Egypt, have preserved the closest 
feature resemblance to their sculptured and pictured ancestry on 
the monuments; and, as Champollion and later Egyptologists 
have proved, the Coptic language, which now survives only in 
their Church liturgy, is as unmistakably the old Pharaonic tongue. 
In it, therefore, . we have still a link with the far-off time of five, 
.six, or seven thousand years ago. 1 



1 The clue to this lingual mystery was supplied by the discovery, in I799» 
of the Rossetta Stone, near the little Delta port from which it takes its name. 
This basaltic block, which now forms one of the treasures of the British 
Museum, bears on its polished front a tri-lingual inscription in Hieroglyphical, 
Demotic, and Greek characters, purporting to be a decree of the priests of 
Egypt in Council at Memphis, in honour of Ptolemy V. (about B.C. 196). 
This guided Dr. Young in 1818 and Champollion three years later (quite 
independently) to the true principles of hieroglyphic interpretation, and became 
in fact the key to the whole hieroglyphic literature on monument and 
ipapyrus which has been so fruitfully studied by later Egyptologists. 



Egypt. 335 

For more than three centuries after the Mahometan conquest, 
Egypt remained a province of the Baghdad Caliphate until, in 
970, Moez, the fourth of the rival Fatimite Caliphs who reigned 
in North Africa, conquered the country, built Cairo, and made it 
the seat of government. This dynasty ruled Egypt for two 
hundred years, when, in 1171, on the death of its last sovereign, his 
Vizier, the famous Saladin, the chivalrous hero of the Crusades, 
seized the vacant throne. 

Not being a descendant of Mahomet, he could not assume the 
Caliphate, and so took merely the title of Sultan, thus severing the 
secular from the religious sovereignty, which continued to be repre- 
sented by a son of the late Caliph. As the theatre of this great 
prince's main achievements lay outside Egypt, I need say nothing 
of his successful resistance to the combined forces and the best 
military genius of nearly all Europe in the Holy Land. For is it 
not all written in Mill's History, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and 
a score of other chronicles of the time ? 

Saladin died at Damascus in 11 93, and then, sixty years later, 
followed the revolution of the Mamelukes, a numerous body of 
guards composed of Turkish and Circassian slaves whom the 
great Sultan and his successors had organised and drilled beyond 
any other Eastern soldiery of the time. For about 1 30 years these 
mixed mercenaries ruled Egypt, till, towards the end of the fourteenth 
century, the Circassians overthrew the Turkish Mamelukes, and 
for another hundred years monopolised the anarchical government 
that followed. Then came the Ottoman conquest, under Sultan 
Selim I., in 1517 — the next, and as yet the last, dynastic land-mark 
in Egyptian history. 

In historical justice, and to avoid the baldness of mere chrono- 
logy, I should here say a word as to the indebtedness of Egyptian 
literature and art to these Saracenic dynasties. First at Alexandria, 
and afterwards at Cairo — as in Syria, at Baghdad, and in Spain, 
the Caliphs fostered learning and the arts with a munificence 
unequalled by either their Greek or Roman predecessors, and 
which stands in still more marked historic contrast to the neglect 
of both by their Tartar successors of Stamboul. Besides them- 
selves founding many great libraries and colleges for the higher 
education, they encouraged the endowment of secondary and 
primary schools by private liberality, till almost every town and 
village of the country had its medreeseh or koultba. Thus it was 
that while Europe was sunk in the intellectual gloom of the 
Middle Ages, Egypt again became the home of science and 



336 National Life and Thought. 

philosophy, which flourished there as, after the decline of the 
Baghdad Caliphate, they flourished nowhere else but in the 
Moorish colleges of Spain. With the fall of the Fatimites, this 
splendid patronage ceased, and thence on through the turbulent 
Mameluke reigns and the still more anarchic times which followed 
the Turkish conquest, Egyptian learning steadily declined, till the 
savants who accompanied Bonaparte's expedition found even in 
Cairo hardly a trace of the letters and art that were rivalling those 
of Cordova and Seville when Peter preached the first Crusade. 
If learning and the arts, therefore, have declined in Egypt, it is 
but fair to note that not Islam, but the rule of the Turk, which 
blights wherever it falls, is to blame for the fact. 

For two hundred and fifty years Turkish Pashas, commissioned 
from Stamboul, exercised from Cairo a fitful vice-sovereignty over 
the Delta and the Nile Valley. But the power of the Mamelukes,, 
who still constituted the military force of the province, had been 
only scotched ; and during the latter years of this period they 
recovered much of their former authority, with the result of such 
anarchy as rendered the country an easy conquest for Napoleon 
in 1798, when, in the historic battle of the Pyramids, he crushed 
the force of all the Mameluke Beys, and made himself master of 
the country, till driven out of it by the British under Abercromby 
and Hutchinson in 1801. Then, on our retirement, came to the 
front Mehemet Ali, the son of an Albanian petty trader at Cavalla 
in Macedonia, who had come to Egypt as one of a small Turkish 
contingent in time to be badly beaten by the French at Aboukir. 
His courage and energy had, however, so distinguished him that, 
soon after the British left, he had won such popularity with the 
army and the Cairene skeikhs that, in 1805, these together 
proclaimed him Viceroy, and the Porte deemed it politic to recall 
its own nominee and ratify the nomination of the young Albanian 
brigadier. 

How the new vali, or governor, as his official title was, in turn 
baffled the intrigues of the Stamboul divan to effect his overthrow, 
how he made himself sole master of Egypt by exterminating the 
Mamelukes, rescued the Hedjaz from the Wahabees, organised a 
powerful army and navy on the European system, annexed the 
Soudan, conquered Syria, and, after annihilating the Turkish army 
at Koniah in 1832, would have carried his victorious standards to 
the Bosphorus if Russia had not interposed, I need not tell. As 
little need be said of the hollow treaty which recognised his 
feudal sovereignty over Egypt, Crete, Syria, and the large district 









Egypt. 337 

•of Adana in Asia Minor, on the sole condition of his paying 
'tribute. Fresh complications followed in 1839, when the total 
defeat of the Turks by Ibrahim Pasha at Nezib reopened the 
defiles of the Taurus to the victors, and but for the speedy 
intervention of the European Powers would have placed Asia 
Minor and Constantinople itself at their mercy. But here our own 
Government interfered, and the operations of Stopford and Napier 
•on the coast of Syria forced Mehemet Ali to surrender that 
province and content himself with the international recognition of 
his own and his family's right to Egypt only. This was guaranteed 
by the treaty of 1840 between the Porte and the European Powers; 
.and his- title to Egypt having been thus affirmed, by the public 
law of Europe, Mehemet Ali devoted himself during the next seven 
years to the social and material improvement of the country, with 
an aggregate of results which has fixed his place in history as the 
'" Peter the Great " of Egypt. Indeed, except some additions and 
further reforms made during the reign of his reputed grandson, 
Ismail Pasha, the whole administrative system, up till less than 
ten years ago, was, in the main, his work; and notwithstanding many 
admitted defects, it was at his death incomparably the most 
^civilised and efficient of then existing Mussulmen Governments. 

In 1848, this great satrap, then verging on his eightieth year, 
was attacked by a mental malady, induced, as it was said, by a 
potion administered in mistaken kindness by one of his own 
•daughters, and the government was taken over by his adopted 
son, Ibrahim Pasha, the hero of Koniah and Nezib. He lingered 
till August 1849, but Ibrahim had already pre-deceased him; and 
Abbas, a son of the latter, succeeded to the viceregal throne. 
Though born and bred in Egypt, Abbas was a Turk of the worst 
-type — ignorant, cowardly, sensual, fanatic, and opposed to reforms 
-of every sort. Thus his feeble reign of less than six years was, 
in almost everything, a period of retrogression. On a night in 
July 1854, he was strangled in his sleep by a couple of his own 
.slaves, — acting, it was variously said, on a secret order from 
Constantinople, or at the behest of one of his wives. 

To Abbas succeeded Said, the third son of Mehemet Ali, an 
.amiable and liberal-minded prince who retrieved much of the 
mischief done by his predecessor, but lacked the vigorous 
intelligence and force of character required to carry on the great 
work begun by his father. His reign will be chiefly memorable 
for the concession and commencement of the Suez Canal, the 
•colossal work which, while benefiting the trade of the world, has 

Y 



338 National Life and TJiought. 

cost so much to Egypt, Said died in January 1863, and was; 
succeeded by his nephew Ismail Pasha, the second son of 
Ibrahim. 

As most of the leading incidents of this Prince's reign, as- 
also the chief features of his character, are still fresh in the public 
memory, I need merely recall a few of the more salient of both.. 
Amongst the former, history will give the first place to his creation 
of the huge public debt which forms the main element of a. 
problem that still confronts Europe. But, for this the same 
impartial judge will at least equally blame the financial panderers- 
who ministered to his extravagance, with exorbitant profit to- 
themselves, but at ruinous cost to Egypt. On the other hand,, 
it is but historical justice to say that Ismail did much for the 
material progress of the country. He added more than a iooo> 
to the 200 miles of railway in existence at the death of Said. 
He greatly improved the irrigation, and so increased the cultivable- 
area of the country ; multiplied the primary schools, and 
encouraged native industries. For so much, at least, history will 
give him credit. As memorable, though less meritorious, were 
the magnificent fetes with which, in 1869, he opened, the Suez: 
Canal, the great work which England had so long opposed, but 
through which — as if by the irony of history — the first ship that, 
passed flew the English flag, and to the present traffic of which; 
we contribute more than eighty per cent. In personal character,, 
Ismail was of exceptional intelligence, but cruel, crafty, and 
untrustworthy both in politics and in his private relations. At 
length, when no longer able to pay the usurious interest exacted 
by the bondholders, our own and the French Governments — 
moved by Messrs. Friihling and Goschen and the other influential' 
loanmongers — in 1879 induced the Sultan to depose him and set 
up his son, Mehemet Tewfik, in his stead. It may be mentioned, 
that Ismail Pasha was the first of these Ottoman Viceroys who- 
bore the title of " Khedive," which is a Perso-Arabic designation; 
signifying rank a shade less than regal. This he obtained in. 
1867 by heavy bribes to the Sultan and his chief ministers, as- 
he had the year before by similar means ousted his brother and 
uncle from the succession, and secured it for his own eldest 
son, — in virtue of which the latter now nominally reigns. 

Of Ismail since his fall, a word or two will suffice. Carrying 
away with him an enormous private fortune, he settled for a time 
in Naples, and thence, for some years, made frequent and 
lengthened visits to Rome, Paris, London, and elsewhere, on 



Egypt. 339 

errands of unsuccessful intrigue, to recover his lost throne. 
Then, having everywhere failed, in 1888 he shook the dust of 
the West from his feet, and turned in hopeless resignation to the 
Mecca of fallen Pashas — Stamboul — and there, in a palace by 
the Bosphorus, he now lives a virtual State prisoner. Had he 
played his part better, he might, with the full sympathy of Europe, 
have been the independent sovereign of a restored Arab kingdom. 
As it is, he is politically as dead as the Pharaohs. 

Before, in conclusion, rapidly reviewing the decade since Ismail's 
fall, a word may be here conveniently said as to the actual 
social and religious condition of the country which he so waste- 
fully ruled for nearly seventeen years. Its population — which 
includes Arabs, Copts, Turks, Nubians, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, 
and Levantines of every shade of mixed Eastern and European 
blood — numbers in all about 6,000,000, of whom the settled Arabs 
(or fellaheen) exceed 4,500,000, who are all Mussulmans. The 
Christian Copts reckon about 500,000; the Nomad Bedouin 
acknowledging allegiance to the Khedive (who are also Mussul- 
mans), about 350,000 ; the Turks, chiefly descendants of the 
official class since the Conquest, about 15,000; the Nubians, 
hitherto mostly slaves, but now practically freed by quite recent 
law, about 50,000 ; native Greeks and Jews, each about 20,000 ; 
Abyssinians, 5000; Armenians, 15,000; and Syrians and various 
foreigners, about 100,000. 

Of this total, the felaheen almost monopolise the agriculture. 
The Copts, also in part farmers, are mainly handicraftsmen and 
clerks in the Government Offices. The Nubians and Abyssinians 
are mostly domestic servants ; the Jews, Greeks, and Armenians, 
shopkeepers and traders ; and the foreigners anything and every- 
thing for which such a field offers an opening. Thanks to recent 
English administration, the revenue of about ^"10,000,000 raised 
from this mixed aggregate now leaves a small surplus over expen- 
diture ; and but for the exactions of Mr. Goschen's clients, the 
bondholders, the taxation which this entails might be greatly 
reduced. As it is, the fellaheen — for the first time in Egyptian 
history — if still heavily taxed, are no longer fiscally plundered and 
oppressed. 

Of the religion of this large majority of the Egyptian population, 
I have the courage to say that I esteem it much above the 
pseudo-Christianity of the minority. As the result of long 
residence and wide travel in the East, I do not hesitate to testify 
that Islam — away from the corrupt administrative centres — is, in 



340 National Life and Thought. 

point both of faith and morals, a higher religion than the debased 
Christianity of nearly all the Eastern Churches. I go farther, and 
say that the Mohametanism of most of these Egyptian fellaheen, 
as of the moral Turks of Asia Minor, embodies more truth and 
less error than did the Papacy in its grosser form. Thus, the faith 
of Saladin was essentially more Christian than that of Cceur de 
Lion, and Mecca was the shrine of a purer worship than mediaeval 
Rome. Little is it to be wondered at that, in Egypt and throughout 
the East generally, with such illustrations of Christianity before 
their eyes, both Arab and Turk have been proof against the 
Western missionary. 

The virtual bankruptcy in which Ismai'1 left the country 
speedily bore fruit in administrative collapse and military revolt, 
the latter headed by the notorious Arab), now a State prisoner 
in Ceylon. Of our own inglorious bombardment of Alexandria, 
in the alleged interest of restored order, the less said the better ; 
even though the commanding Admiral received a peerage, the 
thanks of Parliament, and ^30,000 for silencing a few old- 
fashioned forts with a fleet of modern iron-clads, and the 
burning of Alexandria thrown in. As rapidly would I slur 
over our subsequent not more glorious operations on land, in 
which a British army corps routed Arabi's rabble at Tel-el-Kebir — 
with similar extravagant reward to the General in command* 
These, and our subsequent costly but futile campaign on the 
Upper Nile, culminating in the tragical failure to save Gordon 
at Khartoum, will form a chapter in Egyptian history of which 
no Englishman, of any party, can be proud. But, in spite of 
all this honouiiess blundering, the stars in their courses have 
been too strong for our so-called statesmanship; and although, 
in 1883, I heard Lord Hartington, in reply to a question in 
the House of Commons, promise that our last redcoat should 
have cleared out of Egypt within six months from that time, 
our flag (as I then ventured to predict) still floats over Cairo, and 
from Alexandria to the Second Cataract our protectorate is now 
an accomplished — if as yet diplomatically an unacknowledged — 
fact. Mehemet Tewfik reigns, but we rule; and great has 
already been the gain to Egypt. Eor the first time for more than 
six thousand years, a just, merciful, and uncorrupt Government 
is being established — such as from Menes to Ismail has never 
ruled the Nile Valley before. Although in party politics my 
own vote is not given to Lord Salisbury, I frankly admit that 
much of the credit for this is due to the policy of more courage 



Egypt 341 

and greater regard for our national interests in Egypt which he 
has followed during the past four years. But Kismet, Fate, the 
Providence which shapes events, underlies and directs it all; 
and, so far as human prescience can forecast, the Englishman 
has planted a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and will keep 
it there until, in turn, the star of our own Empire sets. Having 
put our hand to the plough, we cannot now draw it back. 



XIX. 

SERVIA AND MONTENEGRO. 

J. C. COTTON MINCHIN. 

MY lecture is styled " Servia and Montenegro," but the 
people that inhabit the two territories known on the map 
.as Servia and Montenegro are one and the same. If you ask a 
Montenegrin what language he speaks, he replies, " Serb." 

The last of the Serb Czars fell gloriously fighting at Kossovo in 
1389. To this day the Montenegrin wears a strip of black silk 
upon his headgear in memory of that fatal day. 

In the present lecture I shall endeavour to trace the history of 
the Serb race from the earliest times, and to describe the fall and 
resurrection of this brave but unfortunate people. 

Early in the seventh century, in the reign of the Emperor 
Heraclius, the Asiatic provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire 
were overrun by the Arabs, and adopted the Mahommedan 
religion. In the same reign the Serbs settled south of the 
Danube in the regions where they are now found. These coun- 
tries are to-day severally known as Servia, Old Servia, Bosnia, and 
Herzogovina. Roughly speaking, the north-western slice of the 
Balkan Peninsular has been inhabited by Serbs from the seventh 
•century after Christ. Montenegro was then and for many 
■centuries later without any permanent population. Even as late 
,as the fifteenth century the Black Mountain was only visited by 
herdsmen during the summer season. If we take a bird's-eye 
view of this primitive Servia, we see a race of shepherds 
inhabiting the banks of the Drina, the Bosna, and the Morava, 
.and driving their flocks in summer weather to those lofty moun- 
tains, where, as the national songs relate, the darkness of the forest 
is relieved by white rocks or perpetual snows. For centuries the 
Serbs lived under the rule of native chiefs, solely of their own 
election. This government was patriarchal, but not national. 
The scattered tribes did not yet constitute a State. A national 
King was yet to come. In the ninth century the Serbs and 



344 National Life and Thought. 

Bulgarians were converted to Christianity. The Apostle of the 
Slavs, " Mithodius" was one of the world's greatest men. He was 
not only the missionary of the Slavs, but the greatest of Slav 
patriots, for he is credited with creating the Slavonic alphabet 
Although the creed adopted by the Serbs was that of the Eastern 
Church, they always remained attached to a national as opposed 
to the Greek Church of Constantinople. To the Western Division 
of Christianity they were ecclesiastically opposed ; to the Eastern, 
politically. 

It is the fashion in some quarters to disparage monastic estab- 
lishments; but the fact remains, that it is mainly to the monasteries 
that the Serbs owe the retention not only of their religion, but of 
their nationality. When the waters of Turkish oppression covered 
Servia, the monasteries formed the arks of Christian faith and 
freedom. There seems no reasonable doubt that the conversion 
of Bosnians to Islamism was due to the few religious Houses in 
their country. It has been the misfortune of Servia to have 
suffered at the hands of her neighbours. Greeks, Venetians, Turks, 
Austrians, and Russians have each in turn been a thorn in her 
side. The earliest records of her history are a record of attempts 
by the Greek or Eastern Empire to absorb her. These attempts 
commence with the fourth century, and proved unsuccessful. 
Three hundred years later (1353) the Turks crossed the Hellespont.. 
The Eastern Empire was then sunk into absolute impotence. The 
Bulgarian kingdom was " nodding to its fall." Servia alone of the 
Balkan lands was prosperous and powerful. During the thirteenth 
century the aim of a Serb king was to acquire a firm footing on 
the Adriatic. His title was, " By the grace of God, King of all 
Serbian lands and to the sea coast." With the fourteenth century 
his ambition took a wider flight eastwards as well as westwards. 
Stephen Dushan, the most famous of Serb emperors, could not 
as such ask for the obedience of the Greeks ; he therefore called 
himself the Macedonian Christ-loving Czar. A monarch so 
powerful as Stephen Dushan, Emperor of the Serbs, Bulgarians,, 
and Greeks, seemed destined by Providence to check the advances 
of the Turks. The Osmanli entered Europe in 1353 — Stephen 
Dushan died on his march to Constantinople in 1355. His death 
was followed by anarchy in Servia. On the 15th June 1389 was 
fought between the Turks, the Serbs, Bosnians, and Albanians 
the battle of Kossovo. Both the Serb " Krajl " and the Turkish. 
Sultan were slain. Further details are lost, but the result is only 
too well known. 



Servia and Montenegro. 345. 

Near Vranja, in a gloomy mountain pass, there stand the ruins- 
of a Roman fortress. Such they are to the antiquary, but to the 
peasant they are the ruins of a castle of Kralevitch Marko. 
The rocky mountains which stand on either side of the castle are 
called the Hill of the Cross and the Hill of Weeping, because 
there the hero of Serb legend first heard the news of Kossovo. 
Ever since that day till within the memory of living men, the Serbs 
may truly be said to have borne the cross and wept. They have 
been the scapegoats for the sins of Europe. As Mr. Gladstone 
once expressed it, they were the barren beach upon which the wave 
of Ottoman conquest broke, while behind them flourished the 
harvests of culture and of commerce. To continue the metaphor,, 
so strong was the wave that it carried all before it — even up to the 
gates of Vienna. We only know Turkey in its decrepitude ; in 
Nisch we have a reminder of what a power she once was. The 
bridge across the Nischava bears the following inscription : — 

"Constructed by Vizier Mehemet Pasha, Governor General of Buda 
Pesth, 161 1." 

The Norman Conquest of England was effected by a race not 
more numerous than the English. Servia was overwhelmed by a 
race that could boast of an empire that stretched from Adrianople 
to [Bagdad, and from the Caucasus to the Straits of Gibraltar. 
But even to this mighty wave of Conquest there were limits. 
Bulgaria, Constantinople, Greece, and Bosnia all in turn suc- 
cumbed to the Turk. The brave Serbs who escaped from 
Kossovo found a sanctuary in the mountains that overlook the 
Bay of Cattaro. Their leader, Ivo, surnamed Tsernoi (Black),, 
gave the name of Tzrnogora (Montenegro) to these desert rocks. 

I well remember entering Montenegro from Dalmatia. We: 
had no sooner crossed the frontier than my guide (who was an 
Austrian subject) slipped from his horse, and knelt and "kissed 
the consecrated earth." The soil of Montenegro may well be 
called consecrated ; for what higher form of consecration can the 
fatherland receive than the blood of his sons shed in his defence ? 
Servia having become a Turkish province, her colonists created 
in Montenegro a new and independent Servia. The memory of 
Ivo the Black is still green in the country. Springs, ruins, and 
caverns are called after him, and the people look forward to the 
day when he will reappear as a political Messiah. But Ivo's 
descendants proved unworthy of him ; they committed the un- 
pardonable sin of marrying aliens, and early in the sixteenth 



346 National Life and Thought. 

•century the last descendant of Ivo the Black retired to Venice. 
From 1516 to 1697 Montenegro was ruled by elective Vladikas or 
Bishops; from 1697 to 185 1 by hereditary Vladikas. For the 
Montenegrins the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries 
formed a period of incessant warfare. No wonder that Danilo 
Petrovitch at first refused the honour of being their Bishop. The 
throne of Montenegro nearly proved to him a martyr's throne. 
He was condemned to be crucified by a Turkish Pasha, from 
whom he had purchased a safe-conduct. He bore the cross a 
day's journey, and must have already felt the agony of death, when 
he was ransomed. This happened in 1702. Up till 1703 the 
Serbs of the mountain were no more absolutely independent of 
the Sultan than their enslaved kinsmen of the plain. The 
Havatch or Sultan's slipper tax was levied on the mountaineers. 
In 1703 Danilo Petrovitch celebrated his consecration as a Chris- 
tian Bishop by ordering the slaughter of every Mussulman who 
refused to be baptized. This massacre took place on Christmas 
Eve 1703. It is easy for us enjoying all the blessings of civilisation 
to rebuke the Montenegrin for returning in kind on his pitiless 
persecutor the very cruelties which he suffered himself at his 
hands. It is one of the accursed results of oppression that it begets 
oppression. The slave of to-day is the enslaver of to-morrow, 
thus realising the poet's words — 

" Nos nequiores, mox daturos 
Progeniem vitiosiorem." 

While the Montenegrin was wading through blood to peace and 
freedom, the Serb of the plain was ground down by exactions of 
every kind. His fate was rendered even worse by the interven- 
tion of Europe. The only freeman left in Servia was the brigand 
or heydnc. Veliko, a leader in the Serb War of Independence, 
was a typical heyduc. When the Russians, of whom Veliko 
thought so highly that he could never believe Napoleon to have 
advanced as far as Moscow, told him not to call himself Heyduc, 
which signified a robber, he replied, " I should be sorry if there 
were any greater robber than I am." Yet Veliko, who would 
risk his life for a few piastres, was as generous as he was rapacious. 
"If I possess aught," he would say, "any one may share it with 
me ; but if I have not anything, woe be to him who has and 
does not permit me to share it with him." He used to pray that 
Servia might be engaged in war so long as he lived, but that 
.after his death she might have peace. His prayer was granted. 



Set via and Montenegro. 347 

He fell gloriously defending Negotin against the Turks. His 
last words were, "Stand firm." This was in 1813, and we are 
.anticipating. 

In 1804 Kara George, or Black George, headed a rising in 
Servia, and drove out the Turk. In this he was unaided by the 
foreigner, and succeeded, thanks to native valour and his own 
indomitable will. Kara George was by calling a swineherd, and 
by the grace of God a hero. It may seem ridiculous to compare 
him to his great contemporary Napoleon ; yet if we consider the 
means that were at the disposal of the two men, and the results 
■of their labours, we must admit that the Servian overcame greater 
difficulties than the Corsican, while the good Black George did 
in his lifetime has not been interred with his bones. When 
Napoleon died at St. Helena he left behind him the legacy of 
Imperialism which was to cost France so much blood and 
treasure. When Kara George died, his mantle fell on Milosch. 
To these two men Servia owes her great idea, which means the 
independence and freedom of her people. If Kara George is 
-the Achilles of Servian story, Milosch is the Ulysses, and to the 
wisdom of Milosch his countrymen owe even more than to the 
valour of Black George. 

Kara George was a most extraordinary man. He was very 
taciturn, and would sit for days without uttering a word. Pomp and 
display he despised, but was not insensible to the charms of gold 
In peace he lived as a peasant; in war he was a warrior who 
for years passed as invulnerable and unconquered. His very 
justice was terrible. His only brother violated a maiden. Kara 
George ordered him to be hung at his own door, and forbade his 
mother to wear mourning. If we consider his services to the 
•cause of Servian independence and European freedom, his 
•character assumes heroic proportions ; but the age in which he 
lived rendered the growth of gentler qualities impossible. It is 
an astounding fact that the deliverer of his country was the slayer 
of his own father. In 1787 Kara George took part in a rising, 
and found himself compelled to flee. Not wishing to leave his 
father behind, he took him with him ; but the nearer he approached 
the Save River, which divided them from Austria, the more averse 
•did his father become to cross it. At last the old man positively 
refused to go further. " How," exclaimed Black George, " shall 
I live to see thee slowly tortured to death by the Turks ? It is 
better that I should kill thee myself," and seizing a pistol, he shot 
him dead. Such, then, was the man who summoned his countrymen 



348 National Life and Thought. 

to arise from Turkish oppression or be for ever bondmen. They 
obeyed his summons, and for nine years acknowledged him as chief- 

In 1813, when the rest of Europe was engaged in settling the 
Western question with Napoleon, the unhappy Serbs were en- 
gaged in their own eternal Eastern question. We have no> 
written evidence on the subject ; but it is generally thought in 
Servia that Black George acted on the advice of Nedoba, the-. 
Russian consul at Belgrade, when he fled the country. However 
this may be, Kara George, the invincible warrior, deserted his- 
country in its hour of danger. Such conduct, in such a patriot,, 
must ever remain one of the psychological mysteries of history, but 
the unexpected characterises all the actions of this extraordinary 
man. Forgetful of Veliko's dying words, "Stand firm," Kara 
George, with Nadoba and most of the Voivodes, fled across, 
the Danube. The Turks again repossessed the whole country. 
In this reign of terror the downtrodden Rayahs had but 
one man to look to, and that man was Milosch. " Among the 
faithless, faithful only he." In his country's direst need he- 
remained true to her, and Servia has not proved ungrateful. The 
descendants of Milosch Obrenovitch are now the Royal House of 
Servia. 

On Palm Sunday 18 15 Milosch raised the standard of revolt in the 
village of Takovo. Milosch was a despot, but he was one of those 
despots to whom his countrymen look back with grateful recollection. 
He first made his country independent, and then prevented her 
dismemberment. I should require more time than is at my 
disposal to trace the close connection between the struggle in 
Europe against Napoleon and the struggle in Servia against the 
Sultan. Suffice it to say, that when France was dominant in 
Europe, Turkey was dominant in the Balkan Peninsula; and 
Wellington's victory at Waterloo secured not only the independence 
of the West, but the freedom of the Christian Rajah of Eastern 
Europe. It is a curious but little known fact that on the return of 
Napoleon from Elba, subscriptions were raised among the Christian 
traders of several towns in the Ottoman Empire with the object of 
preventing Napoleon again becoming Emperor. In addition to 
these foreign and external causes for the overthrow of the Turkish 
power in Servia, there were other reasons most honourable to> 
Milosch which explain his success. There is a principle of 
retribution in the affairs of nations as of individuals ; and the 
victories of Kara George, accompanied as they were by cruelty,, 
brought no lasting peace. To the honour of Milosch, he not only 



Servia and Montenegro. 349 

kept faith with the defeated Turk, but treated him with signal cle- 
mency. On one occasion some Mohammedan women who fell into 
his hands were so touched by his generosity that they exclaimed, "A 
religion which commanded such conduct must be the true one." 

It is now my duty to refer to one of the blackest incidents in 
Serb history. In 18 18 Kara George crossed over the Danube to 
Semendria in Servia. He came at a most critical time, when 
•divided councils would have again brought the country under the 
Turkish yoke. It is the opinion of the best authorities that it was 
not by the order of Milosch that Kara George was put to death, 
but the ugly fact remains that the Leader of the first Serb 
Revolution was murdered by a Serb, and on Serb soil. 

In 181 7 Milosch was proclaimed hereditary Prince of Servia 
by the National Assembly. Milosch was never a favourite with 
Russia, and even as late as 1820 the Russian Ambassador at 
Constantinople used to speak of the elect of the nation as M. 
Obrenovitch. Nil Popov, the Russian historian, admits that 
Russia " feared that Milosch would secure for Servia a position 
like that of Moldavia and Wallachia; and that having once 
obtained freedom of internal legislation, he would aspire also to 
an independent foreign policy." The government of St. Peters- 
burg have doggedly adhered to a plan of action long ago laid 
down. Their motto is not, "The East for Eastern People," but, 
"The East must either be subject to Russia, or become the prey 
to endless strife and discord.'" The history of Servia forms a sad 
sermon to that text. In 1830 the autonomy of Servia was at 
length solemnly recognised by the Porte, and Milosch proclaimed 
"the father of the Fatherland." 

' One incident only marred the triumph of Milosch. It was 
stipulated by the Hatti-scheriff that the Mahommedans should 
leave the cities. The Governor of Belgrade, who was a corrupt 
man, demanded a price before withdrawing his troops. Milosch, 
who thought he had already paid the Pasha enough, refused to 
concede this last demand. The matter was referred to the arbi- 
tration of the Czar, and Nicholas decided in favour of the Turks. 
If asked why the descendants of Milosch still rule over Servia, 
and not the descendants of Kara George, my answer is that every 
step in Servian progress is connected with the Obrenovitch 
dynasty. The liberation of the country, the creation of a peasant 
proprietary, the final withdrawal of the Turkish troops from 
Belgrade in 1862, the independence of the country, the extension 
of its territory, and the making of its railways, — all of these are 



350 



National Life atid Thought. 



among the results of Obrenovitch rule. The founder of the 
dynasty had in 1830 a great opportunity of making his people 
free as well as independent. Eut Milosch had lived too long with 
Turks to be a lover of freedom. " Am I not the master ? " he was 
heard to say, " and shall I not be at liberty to do what I please ? " 
Acting on this principle, he burnt one of the suburbs of Belgrade, 
because he wished to erect new buildings on the site. He 
exacted bond-service, and the tradesmen of Belgrade had to close 
their shops and assist the Prince in his hay harvest. Milosch, 
however, rendered one splendid service to posterity. His followers 
urged him to perpetuate in Servia the Turkish system of large 
landowners. This had been done in Wallachia, when the 
Mahommedan had been replaced by Christian landlords. The 
Spahis had been driven out of Servia, and there were specious 
arguments in favour of giving their large estates to the leaders of 
the War of Liberation. It would also have facilitated the 
collection of the revenue. Milosch resisted the temptation, and 
distributed the estates of the expelled Turkish landlords among 
the peasantry. Peasant proprietorship has proved an unmixed 
blessing to Servia, and Serbs are most zealous of retaining 
it. Nowhere else in Europe, not even in France, has the 
cultivator so firm a grip of the land. It might be thought that one 
who had freed his country from the invader, and its soil from the 
landgrabber, would have reigned secure, but this was not to be. 
In 1839 Milosch abdicated. The reason for this step was that 
he refused to accept a constitution which Russia and Turkey had 
concocted for him. This charter vested the actual government 
of the country in a Senate composed of Milosch's rivals, and 
entirely independent of that Prince. The vice of this foreign 
constitution was that it was anti-democratic, no less than anti- 
dynastic. Milosch was succeeded first by his son Milan, and on 
Milan's death by Michael. Michael was too gentle for the 
troubled times in which he lived, and after a two years' reign he 
too started upon his travels. History repeats itself, and the fall of 
the House of Obrenovitch in 1842 was mainly due to its own 
dissensions. Wife worked against husband, brother against 
brother, and thus their adversaries prevailed against them. 

Louis Philippe brought the bones of Napoleon from St. 
Helena and interred them at the Invalides. The Napoleonic 
legend was thus revived, and France was cursed with the Second 
Empire. A similar result followed from similar causes in Servia. 
In 1842 the widow of Kara George died Michel, who was the 



Servia and Montenegro. 351 

very soul of chivalry, buried her with great pomp and state by 
the side of her husband. The intriguing Senators, or Defenders 
of the Constitution, as they styled themselves, who had exiled 
Milosch, felt their position insecure while a son of their old 
master remained on the throne. They therefore utilised this 
public funeral to revive the Kara George legend, and pointed to 
his son as the hope of the nation. Accordingly, when Michel 
crossed the Save, Alexander Kara Georgevitch was elected Prince 
of Servia. From 1842 to 1858 the son of Black George lived— 
he .can scarcely be said to have reigned— in Belgrade. During 
these seventeen years this feeble son of a strong man did 
absolutely nothing for his country. His reign was a blank. 
Late in 1858 he fled from Servia, and Milosch ruled in his stead. 
Milosch is the Grand Old Man of Serb history. His mere 
presence in Servia checked the intrigues of foreign powers. He 
died peacefully in his bed. If you wish to read his epitaph, look 
around at the prosperous peasant proprietors of Servia. The 
creation of these forms a varnish which (in the eyes of his 
countrymen at least) covers all his faults. Michel succeeded his 
father. Never were father and son more unlike. Milosch could 
neither read nor write, and his virtues were rather of a public than 
a private order. Michel possessed a cultivated mind, and was 
great enough to forgive his enemies. Milosch was an intensely 
personal ruler. " L'etat c y est moi" might have been his motto. 
Michel had a nobler device, "The law is the supreme will in 
Servia." The one blot on Michel's character was his determin- 
ation after thirteen years of marriage to divorce his wife. Her 
barrenness was her only fault. In moral turpitude the conduct 
of Michel cannot for one moment be fairly contrasted with that 
of his successor, yet here again history repeats itself. Michel's 
prime minister Garaschanine resigned rather than countenance 
this step. Garaschanine's son, as prime minister to King Milan, 
acted exactly as his father had done. In both cases misfortune 
overtook the faithless husband. Prince Michel was murdered by 
convicts in the park at Topschidera near Belgrade. There 
seems to be no reasonable doubt that these wretched murderers 
were tools of the Kara Georgevitch faction, if not of Kara George- 
vitch himself. The son of Kara George was condemned by a 
Hungarian Court to twenty years' imp?'isonment as the instigator 
of the crime ; and a special clause, that was promulgated in the 
Constitution by the Regency under Prince Michel's successor, 
excluded for ever from the throne of Servia the family of Kara 



.35 2 National Life and Thought. 

■George. Michel was succeeded (1868) by Milan, the grandson 
of Zephrem, the brother of Milosch. As Milan was barely four- 
teen years of age, a Regency of three was appointed. Of these 
three Regents, one was the famous Ristitch, who after an interval 
of twenty years again finds himself the Regent of a boy king. 

We must now return to the Serbs of the Black Mountain. The 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were for Montenegro a 
struggle for existence. In the nineteenth century began their 
struggle for an outlet to the sea. The fall of Venice would 
naturally have given the mountaineers the bay of Cattaro, had 
not the French stepped in and annexed Dalmatia. Marmont was 
in command of the French troops, and he reproached the Vladika 
Peter I. with the national practice of cutting off the heads of their 
enemies. "We do so," replied the Bishop, "and why not? 
Which is worse, that we should take off the heads of the French 
who are our enemies, or that the French should take off the heads 
of their King and of their fellow-citizens. We do so to our foes, 
you to your fellow subjects." But Peter did not hold his own 
merely in wordy warfare. In 18 13, with the aid of the British 
fleet, he took Cattaro from the French, but (pursuant to an 
.arrangement between Russia and Austria) was compelled sub- 
sequently to relinquish it to the latter power. One word must 
be said about the new territory which has been given Montenegro 
by the treaty of Berlin. Confined to her former small limits, 
Montenegro had done great things in the past; but she might 
have become a source of danger in the future, standing, as she 
did, like an entrenched camp in the midst of Europe. All this 
had been remedied by the cession of Dulcigno to Montenegro. 
There may, indeed, have been more brilliant strokes of policy ; 
but seldom has the foreign policy of England been more just to 
all concerned, or more fraught with good to the whole of Europe. 
In giving Dulcigno to Montenegro, Mr. Gladstone has given the 
principality a window through which it can peep into Europe, 
and with seeing it may come to imitate. Montenegro has now 
given hostages to fortune. She is no longer a little mountain 
State with nothing to lose and everything to gain from going to 
war, but a State with a seaboard and a territory that lies outside 
the charmed circle of her rocks. 

Peter I. of Montenegro, the brave but obscure antagonist of 
Napoleon, died in 1830, at the age of eighty. So simple were 
his ways of life, that in his last illness he had not even a fire in 
the cell that served him for a bedroom. His nephew, Peter II., 



Servia and Montenegro. 353 

was a wise ruler, ruling by the true divine right of being the best 
man in his country. At his own wish he was buried on the 
summit of a lofty mountain, a fitting spot in which to bury a 
poet. For there, " On the Crown of the Mountain," the name of 
his greatest poem, he peacefully slumbers in the calm moonlight, 
and there he receives morning's first beam. The glorious rulers 
of the Black Mountain might, if urged to take rest, have given 
the famous answer, "Rest above;" they took none on earth. On 
the death of Peter II., Prince Danilo, the uncle of the present 
Prince, went to Russia to be consecrated Bishop of Montenegro. 
The Czar seems to have laughed him out of this ancient practice ; 
and the late Prince, instead of converting himself into monk and 
bishop, returned to his own country and married. Of course, 
there was a great uproar among the Conservatives, but it is a 
very grave question whether they were not right. Up to 1851 the 
Montenegrins had been wont to look up to the Prince of Servia 
as the head of the Serb race, while the Serbs of the Danubian 
principality looked up to the Vladika as the head of the Serb 
Church. All this was changed in 1 85 1. The Prince of Montenegro 
became the rival of the Prince of Servia. Danilo was, however, 
so great a man that he could afford to take a second place. He 
declared himself the first soldier in the army of the Prince of 
Servia, and he recognised in Michel the head of his race. 1 

The close alliance of the two Serb princes would have been 
fruitful in blessings to their own subjects, and would have 
strengthened a hundredfold the prospects of European peace. 
Soon after his famous utterance of goodwill and union with Seryia, 
Prince Danilo was assassinated at Cattaro (i860). The secret 
springs of this crime will never be disclosed until that day when 
all secrets will be revealed. It is at least significant that prior to 
Danilo's murder Russia withdrew the annual allowance she had 
been in the practice of making to him. The withdrawal of this 
allowance produced a deficit in the national revenue, which 
Prince Danilo endeavoured to cover by fresh taxes. These taxes . 



1 A treaty existed between Prince Michel and Prince Nicholas of Montenegro, 
by which the latter recognised the Prince of Servia as the leader of the " Serb 
Movement," and bound himself to support any plan Prince Michel might 
form for the delivery of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But after Prince Michel's 
murder, on a hint from St. Petersburg, Prince Nicholas declared the treaty 
to be no longer in force. 

For another instance of Russian mischief-making, see Minchin's Growth 
of Freedom in the Balkan Peninsula (John Murray), page 88. 

Z 



354 National Life and Thong Jit. 

•caused disturbances, and the disturbances were followed by 
Prince Danilo's assassination. He was succeeded by his nephew 
Nicholas. 

Our brief history has now been brought down to the reigns of 
two living Serb rulers — the ex-King Milan and Prince Nicholas 
of Montenegro. It would be impossible within our limits to 
narrate here the story of the two Serb campaigns against Turkey 
(1876 and 1877), of the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina 
by Austria Hungary (1878), of the extension of territory and 
founding of the kingdom (1882), of the abortive Radical rising in 
1884, of the disastrous campaign against Bulgaria in 1885, of the 
divorce and abdication of King Milan. To pass over this last 
event without comment would, however, be cowardly and unjust 
to the Serbs themselves. The mistake Nicholas Christitch and 
his Cabinet committed was that they believed in their King. It is 
the old cry of him "that hangs on princes' favours," "Had I 
served my God with half the zeal I served my King, he would not 
in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies." 

King Milan said he would abdicate if he did not get his 
divorce. To save the country from the dangers attending a 
prolonged minority, the King's wish was gratified; and when 
Milan found himself relieved of his wife, he quickly relieved 
himself of his kingdom. In all history you can find no instance 
of a monarch purchasing his own ease at such a price to his 
country. I recently received a letter from a Serb statesman. I 
regret that I cannot quote from it. If you can imagine a letter 
from Lord Chancellor Clarendon, written after his fall, to an 
intimate friend, you will gather but half the bitterness of that 
letter. It was the outpourings of a loyal soul which has found 
out that the idol of his life was a fraud. To compare Milan to 
our own Charles II. is to do injustice to our own sovereign. He 
at least did not spend the taxes of his country in a foreign 
capital. He kept up some semblance of royal self-respect, and 
died in the country of his birth. The spectacle of their ex-King a 
voluntary exile in a strange land is to a Serb the very quintessence 
of baseness and corruption. It was not a Radical, but Garaschanine, 
who described Milan's abdication as "a flight from the battle 
field." 

Before this lecture closes a few words must be said about the 
present government and condition of the two Serb countries. 
The Montenegrin government is soon described ; it is purely 
despotic, untempered by regicide, and, it must be added, is as 



Service and Montenegro. 355 

popular as it is absolute. The Serb of the mountain is intensely 
national, and will always fight against a foreign despot. The 
Serb of the kingdom goes further than this — he would be free not 
■only from foreign but domestic tyranny. He is the Frenchman 
of the Peninsula, and is always ready to fight for an idea. Of all 
European countries, Servia should be to the political observer of 
to-day the most interesting, because in Servia alone is Socialism 
the keystone of the arch. You are aware that before his 
abdication King Milan gave the royal assent to a new Servian 
constitution, of which I will now give you some of the leading 
features. 

There are two National Assemblies or Skupshtinas. The one 
is the Ordinary Skupshtina, and the other the Extraordinary or 
•Grand Skupshtina. Under the old Serb constitution every 
.arrondisement and every chief town of a department returned one 
■deputy to the Ordinary Skupshtina for every 3000 taxpayers. For 
arrondisement or department towns, if under 3000 taxpaying 
inhabitants, one member was allowed. If, after an election in the 
■bigger places, a group of under 3000 remained unrepresented, this 
group was allowed another member. For instance, if the town of 
X had 9000 odd taxpayers, it would return four members to the 
Skupshtina, one for each 3000, and another for the surplus. Thus 
the number of members in Skupshtinas under the old Constitution 
was an accident dependent upon the distribution of population. 
Under the new constitution this minority representation has been 
.slightly limited. In addition to the popular representatives, the 
King had a right of nominating to the ordinary Skupshtina a 
member for every three elected. The Grand Skupshtina is elected 
entirely by popular vote. Now, under the new constitution, each 
department elects a member for each group of 4500 taxpayers ; 
and if a group of less than 4500, but over 3000 electors, have no 
representative, they are allowed to count one member more. 
Just as four members were formerely given to London on account 
of the city's past services in the cause of English liberty, so the 
two villages of Dobrinje and Takovo are allowed a member each, 
as being the birthplaces of Kara George and Milosch Obrenovitch. 
Every male Serb (whether a Serb by birth or naturalisation) who 
is twenty-one years of age, and pays fifteen francs a year in direct 
taxes, is entitled to a vote. And here may be mentioned a 
patriarchal survival that we find in parts of Servia existing along- 
side of manhood suffrage. This is the Zadruga. The great poet 
whom we have just lost was not blind to the ills and calamities of 



356 National Life and Thought. 

life, but he looked at trouble as motes in the sunshine of God's- 
love. The Turkish conquest was indeed a fiery furnace, but it was 
a furnace that has purged the democratic ore of Serb society from 
the dross of feudalism. After Kossovo the Serbs reverted to the 
patriarchal form which the Slavonic settlers had carried with them 
into the Balkan Peninsula when they settled there in the times of 
Heraclius. Equality and fraternity reign within the paling of the- 
Zadruga or house community. It is forbidden, as far as possible,, 
to alienate their property, or to subdivide it among their members.. 
No superiority is recognised save that of age and parentage. The 
Serb Constitution gives a vote to every adult male member of a 
Zadruga, although the head of the family does all the taxpaying 
for his clansmen. The chief democratic feature in the new 
Constitution is that the King no longer has a right to nominate 
members to the Ordinary Skupshtina. Under Article ioo of the 
new Constitution (an article on which I have reason to believe 
King Milan insisted) two of the members elected by a Depart- 
ment (not towns) must be the holders of a foreign university 
degree or Serb "faculty." This article does not apply to the 
Grand Skupshtina; in other respects the mode of election to> 
both is identical. 

A Grand Skupshtina contains twice the number of members 
that an Ordinary Skupshtina contains. A Grand or Extraordinary 
Skupshtina is now sitting. It was called together under a pro- 
visional law of the Council of State to remodel the laws, which 
have in many cases been strained in direct opposition to the 
spirit of the new Constitution. For instance, the Constitution 
appears plainly to intend that if the voting power of Department 
X be four members, and if the voting power of the town Y two- 
members, that the total representation of X and Y together shall 
be six. The Radicals, however, will it otherwise. To increase 
the power of the county electors, who plump for the Radicals,, 
the votes of Y are added to the votes of X, and thus X returns, 
six instead of four numbers, and X and Y together return eight 
instead of six numbers. 

Every elector is eligible for election to either Skupshtina under 
the following conditions. He must be a resident in Servia, 
unless he be a State employe in a foreign country ; he must be 
thirty years of age, and pay thirty francs a year in direct taxes. 
No criminal, nor bankrupt, nor that very useful public servant — 
a policeman — can sit. A Government employe, if elected, loses- 
his post and any benefit from past services unless he be — 



Servia and Montenegro. 357 

1. Either an actual Minister or one en dispensabilite. 

2. A member of the Council of State. 

3. A Minister Plenipotentiary, Diplomatic Agent, or Consul- 
•General. 

4. President or Member of the Tribunal of First, Second, or 
Third Instance. 

5. Professor of High and Superior Schools, Engineer, and 
Doctor in the State Service. 

6. Retired Employe. 

Ministers have ex-officio seats in the Skupshtina, and have no 
■necessity for election or selection on taking a portfolio. There 
is no right nor left of the President's chair, but each member 
.sits where he pleases, save that the front bench is reserved for 
Ministers. 

Payment of Members and Triennial Parliaments are both in 
force in Servia. Members of the Ordinary Skupshtina are given 
their travelling expenses and a daily allowance during Sessions. 
The amount of this allowance will be fixed by the present 
Assembly, and used to be between ten and twelve francs a day. 
The Grand Skupshtina is always elected for some particular 
purpose, viz.: — 

1. To settle matters relative to the Dynasty and succession to 
.the Throne. 

2. To elect the Regents. 

3. To deliberate on a change in the Constitution. 

4. To examine questions relative to a modification of territory. 

5. Whenever the King thinks fit to summon it. 

A Grand Skupshtina is dissolved when the particular object for 
which it was summoned has been attained. 

The local government of Servia is on the following lines : In 
villages where the taxpayers number 200, the Mayor will have a 
Municipal Council of ten members ; where the taxpayers number 
■over 200 and under 500, he will have sixteen Councillors; where 
,there are over 500 taxpayers he will have twenty Councillors. 
Belgrade has a Council of thirty-two. Councillors are unpaid, 
but Mayors and Sub-Mayors (Kmets) are elected and paid by the 
taxpayers. Any elector is eligible to be a Kmet, unless he be an 
■employe whose duty brings him in direct touch with the Mayor- 
alty. If a Mayoralty is composed of several villages, the President 
or Mayor is elected by the entire Mayoralty, while each village 
.elects its own Kmet. Mayors and Kmets discharge the duties 



358 National Life and Thought. 

that in England are intrusted to our paid and unpaid magistrates.. 
They are elected for a term of two years. The number of Kmets 
for each village is determined by the amount of work they have to 
get through, and their salaries, as well as those of the Mayors, are 
settled by the Municipal Councils. Two Councillors are attached 
to each Kmet, or failing them, two honest peasants as assistants.. 
I cannot tell you in what the difference between the two classes 
of assessors consists, unless the test of honesty is not to be 
applied to a County Councillor. What we should call police 
cases are tried by the Mayor and two Kmets. The accused is 
given no choice as to the manner of his trial, and must go before- 
a jury on three charges only, viz. — arson, murder with robbery,, 
or robbery with violence. 

The new Press Law is all that it should be — in theory. It 
Avould be well if in practice it were half as perfect. The corre- 
spondents of the Standard and the Doily News have both been 
expelled from Servia ; the former has been allowed to return, but 
the latter is still an exile at Semlin. Some hundred lawsuits are- 
said to be hanging over various Opposition newspapers, and fifty 
of them over the celebrated Peter Theodorovitch, who has wisely 
betaken himself to Italy. This whilom Radical leader was charged 
with writing and speaking against the ex-King, and when acquitted 
on that charge, was imprisoned "par vote correctionelle? A 
power of giving a month's imprisonment was vested in the- 
Prefects under the old law, but has (they say) been repealed by 
the new Constitution. Let us hope so. 

The daily wages of skilled labour in Servia may be reckoned 
at from 5 to 6 francs a day, and unskilled from 2 francs to> 
2*50 a day. The best miners are Italians, who nearly all prefer 
piecework. In fact, except with navvies and farm labourers — a 
7-ara avis in Servia — piecework is the rule. A working man can 
live well in Servia on a franc a day ; but, there is no denying it r 
he is most heavily taxed. On this, as on so many other topics,, 
you cannot do better than refer to the Report on the Trade of 
Servia for the years 1887 and 1888, made by Mr. Macdonald, our 
Consul at Nisch, which is the best account of Servian trade that 
it has ever been my pleasure to peruse. What a peasant lives on 
is a bit of bread, black and hard like sunburnt mud, and an onion, 
and such fare as this does not cost him more than twenty or thirty 
centimes a day. A good deal more goes in raki. The Serbs are 
not teetotallers ; but, so far as my observation goes, they are not: 
drunkards. 



Servia and Montenegro. 359 

The National Debt of Servia amounts to fourteen millions or 
^8 per head of the population. The chief exports of Servia are 
pigs, dried plums, and wine, and for the year 1888 scarcely- 
exceeded in value one-and-a-half million sterling. The exports 
from Servia into this country for 1888 only amounted to ^3259,, 
and the imports from Great Britain for the same year to about 
^110,000. In the commercial dependence of Serbs on their 
powerful neighbours across the Save and the Danube, no less 
than in the occupation of Bosnia, a country inhabited in the main 
by the same Serb race, you must seek for the causes of the 
unpopularity of Austria in Servia. There are 458 miles of railway, 
and on these railways you pass through a land of the most varied 
scenery — a land whose soil is extraordinarily fertile ; whose plains 
team with cattle and swine, and are yellow with maize and wheat ; 
whose orchards are blue with the plum ; whose rivers abound with 
fish ; whose hills are vineyards ; and whose mountains are covered 
with oaks, ancient enough to have witnessed the march of the 
conquering Osmanli. 

Young as Servia is, she is already cursed with "sweating." A 
new well was made for a friend of mine. The contractor charged 
him 175 francs, but the Italian who dug it out to a total depth of 
eight metres told my friend he only got twenty francs for the job. 
Consul Macdonald, on the 24th page of his Report, gives a strik- 
ing instance of " sweating." The peasant women who make the 
carpets of Pirot are mostly in the hands of taskmasters, who pay 
them, as a rule, the sweating wages of 3! d. and a little bread per 
day. Our Consul offered a Pirot peasant the town price for a large 
carpet. Had his offer been accepted, the whole of the profits 
(instead of being divided with the middleman) would have gone 
direct to the producer. Not only was his offer declined, but so 
unreasonable a price was demanded, that he was compelled to 
buy from the retail merchant. Apparently this Serb bondsman 
preferred to be " sweated " by his countryman to selling at a profit 
to an alien. The hatred of a Serb for a foreigner is an unfortunate 
fact. It is the honourable distinction of the Progressist that he 
alone among Serb politicians has'never pandered to this foible. 

The only strike I have ever heard of in Servia occurred quite 
recently at Nisch, when eighty mechanics at the railway station 
struck work on account of delay in payment of their wages. They 
also demanded the expulsion of all foreigners from the lines. 
There are, however, so many holidays in Servia that workmen 
might stay away without being missed. There are no Trade 



,360 National Life and Thought. 

Unions, as we understand them, but there are Trade Guilds or 
Esnafs. These are a curious survival of the Middle Ages. They 
form the Guilds of the various trades, and regulate the condition 
of apprentices and the privileges of master and workmen. They 
receive no State support, and are maintained by employers and 
workmen for the following purposes : — 

1. To help old and sick members incapacitated from work. 

2. To help destitute members. 

3. To help widows and orphans of members, especially in 
educating the latter. 

4. To pay the travelling expenses of members in search of work. 

5. To give alms in church on feast day of Patron Saint of 
Esnaf. 

The Esnafs exist independently of each other in the towns of 
Servia ; there is no federation among them. There is no Em- 
ployers' Liability Act, and damages for accidents are privately 
arranged. Education is the bright spot in the social system of 
the Serbs. It is both compulsory and free, and in the case of a 
promising lad includes his studies both at the Belgrade and a 
foreign university. In 1834 there was not a school in the country, 
except in the chief towns — in all, perhaps twenty-five. In 1884 
scarcely a village was without one. This subject has been fully 
dealt with by me elsewhere. 

There are three political parties in Servia — Liberal, Progressist, 
and Radical. There are three Regents — Ristitch, Belo Mar- 
covitch, and General Protitch — who are all practically Liberals. 
Ristitch is the former chief of the party called Liberal. His 
admirers call him the Bismarck of the Balkans. No one can deny 
his patriotism, nor his desire to make Servia the Piedmont of the 
Balkan Peninsula. Belo Marcovitch is a dashing soldier, who 
took Nisch and Vranja from the Turks, but grave doubts exist as 
to his integrity. He was impeached before the Skupshtina for 
embezzlement, but was acquitted. General Protitch belongs to no 
political party, and may fairly be described as a King's Friend. 
He is a brave soldier, an indefatigable worker, and an honourable 
man. If the " Liberals " are the Conservatives of Servia, the Pro- 
gressists might be called her Whigs. They are unrepresented in 
the present Grand Skupshtina, which consists of — 

Liberals, 15. 
Progressists, none. 
Radicals, 102. 



Servia and Montenegro. '.'.. 361 

The Progressists held office from 1880 to 1888 ; great, therefore, 
has been their fall. It is, however, noteworthy that at the 
Communal elections of last December the Liberals and Progressists 
coalesced. Party feeling runs very high ; and only last year 
a peasant told a friend of mine that his house had been burnt 
over his head by his fellow villagers merely because he was a 
Progressist. The Radicals are now in office, but their power is 
not absolute. The Regents and the Cabinet agree together about 
as well as our House of Lords and a Radical House of Commons. 
A Serb, who knows Ristitch well, said to me, " Yes, he is Regent 
again, but this time he is like a tiger behind bars." Besides the 
Regents there are other rocks ahead of the Radical ministry — their 
inexperience of office and the high hopes that have been excited 
by their promises. The Progressists say, and with some force, 
that the culture and intelligence of the country is with them. On 
the other hand, the present Radical Government are showing a 
vigour and an honesty which may falsify the prophecies of their 
opponents. The cleavage between the two parties — Radical and 
Progressist — is twofold, one foreign and one domestic ; the 
cleavage between the Radical and the Liberal is mainly domestic. 
The Radical was for Russia, and in this supported Ristitch ; the 
Progressist was for Austria. Whether this will remain so is 
•doubtful, as the St. Petersburg Cabinet has always hitherto 
supported the Opposition in Servia. The principle which divides 
them in home politics is the objection of the Radical to the 
foreign capitalist. The Radical wishes to keep Servia an agricul- 
tural country ; the aim of the Progressist, when in power, was to 
open up the resources of Servia by aid of foreign capital. To the 
Radical this means the degradation of native labour. He fears 
that large fortunes will create a proletariat. At present Servia is a 
land of very moderate incomes, where wealth does not accumulate, 
.and where men do not decay. Every rood of land maintains its 
man. There are no poor laws, because there are no poor. If a 
beggar accosts you, you may be sure he is a foreigner. The mass 
of the Serb nation is wealthier than any other. This was shown a 
few years ago, when two- thirds of the capital of the National Bank 
was subscribed by Serbs, who took from one to five shares each. 
The sunshine in which the peasantry bask is not without its 
shadow — flattery. Entire parts of verbs, such as gerunds, have been 
•discarded by some Serb writers, who in their desire to show their 
sympathy with the masses, have imitated their uncultured language 
to such a degree as themselves to become uncouth and unintel- 



362 National Life and Thought. 

ligible. Let us not however fall into the opposite error of dispar- 
agement. The energy with which the Serbs have surmounted 
difficulties in the past give us grounds for believing that they will 
show the same energy in the future. Freedom is the only thing 
in this world for which too high a price cannot be paid. The 
Serbs have lived up to this principle, ay, and died for it. They 
have worked out their own salvation. Blotted out from the map, 
Servia has again appeared, her boundaries marked out by the 
swords of her own sons. Let us extend the hand of good fellowship' 
to a race which, " through a cloud, not of war only," has at length, 
taken its place among the free nations of Europe. 



XX. 
JEWS IN THEIR RELATION TO OTHER RACES. 

THE REV. S. SINGER. 

I WOULD like to express to you, however imperfectly, the 
sense of obligation under which I feel at having been in- 
vited to take part in this series of discourses on National Life 
and Thought. Your course of lectures would certainly have 
lacked one element of completeness if it had, even by implication, 
excluded from the community of nations one of the oldest, tough- 
est, most virile, and most distinctively marked of races. " The 
amount of information which people do not possess " about Jews 
" is really prodigious." In an age of insatiable inquiry, when the 
electric light of publicity plays upon almost every phase, and 
illumines almost every nook of the inner life of nations and 
families, there is no race on the face of the earth at once so 
ubiquitous, and therefore so open to observation, and at bottom 
so little understood. You may not go all the way with what 
Heine wrote in his Confessions; to the main idea, however,, 
contained in one of his remarks, you can hardly withhold your 
assent : " Neither the conduct nor the essential character of the 
Jews is understood by the world. People think they know them 
because they see their beards ; but more than that never was 
perceived of them ; and as in the Middle Ages, so they continue 
in modern times, a wandering mystery." x But whose fault is it 
if they rem'ain a wandering mystery? The more people, and 
especially our own countrymen, know about Jews, the more they 
will find that the greatest of all mysteries in reference to them 
is that there is no mystery. Unlike the shrines of other nations, 
even our Holy of Holies contained no secret. What of mystery 
need there be then about us, unless it be the riddle, as insoluble 
to us as to you, of our existence, and of the dual current, about 
which I shall presently have to say more, that can be traced along 
the whole channel of our lives. 



1 Heine's JVerke, xi\ r . 296. 
363 



364 National Life and Thought. 

With the particular doctrines, positive or negative, held by the 
majority of those who are in the habit of assembling here, I need 
hardly say I do not in any way identify myself. But your action 
in regard to my own particular community seems to me to claim 
some recognition. If I were to go this afternoon into a place of 
worship of any of the numerous sects into which Christendom is 
divided, I should hear the Jews spoken of eloquently, dully, 
learnedly, ignorantly, wisely, absurdly, lovingly, angrily, as the 
case might be : the only thing which the greater part of the state- 
ments there to be listened to would seem to me, as a Jew, to 
lack, would be an approach to verisimilitude. Among public 
bodies the distinction is in an eminent degree yours— that in 
your search for truth you have gone on this, as on former 
occasions, to those who may be presumed qualified to speak with 
authority upon subjects with which they personally are best 
acquainted. 

On Wednesday evening last, in all the Synagogues of Jewry, 
there was read aloud to the congregations there assembled an 
old story, to which, whatever else Bible critics may have to say 
about it, they will not deny the merits of dramatic force, and, as 
regards the major part of the book at least, literary skill. It was 
the account of the perils and deliverance of that remnant of the 
house of Israel which, after the fall of the first Temple, found a 
home in lands, later on to form part of the Medo-Persian empire. 
One of the neatest passages in the book is the preamble where- 
with the Grand Vizier of Ahasuerus introduced to the King his 
project of what might be called " a short way with Jews." Many 
such "short ways" have been proposed at various times. Dur- 
ing the height of the anti-Semitic fever in Berlin, about the 
wittiest thing that emanated from our opponents was the issue 
of a mock railway-ticket, marked " To Jerusalem. Single ticket. 
No return tickets issued." This was not Haman's method ; but 
what he had to say was interesting for another reason. It was 
not all falsehood ; that would have been too clumsy. Haman 
knew his master too well to offer even such a gobe-mouches, a 
dish of undiluted lies. It was by no means all truth ; it was 
a deft mixture of the two, with the evident object that the un- 
truth might pass current by reason of its being in good company, 
just as those who utter counterfeit coin are generally found pass- 
ing genuine pieces along with the others in order to cover, and 
divert suspicion from, the spurious ones. " There is one people," 
said Haman, " scattered abroad and dispersed among the 



Jews in their Relation to Other Races. 365. 

peoples." Undeniable, — the solidarity of the Jewish race is a 
fact as patent as their dispersion ; they are one people, though 
scattered. "And their laws are diverse from those of all other 
people." That is only fractionally true. "And they do not 
keep the king's laws." That is distinctly false, and the infer- 
ence drawn therefrom, that " it is not to the king's profit to 
suffer them," is consequently baseless and invalid. 

Severe as the accusation sounds, one might assert that these 
words express not inaptly the sentiments with which, until com- 
paratively recent times, most of the nations among whom it has 
been Israel's lot to be divided regarded them. They have resented 
that singular and tenacious union among Jews, which no geogra- 
phical distribution seems able to break up ; they have blamed them 
for a spirit of separateness,. which is both good and evil ; — good 
in so far as every race has to work out its own destiny on its 
own lines ; evil in so far as it is the result of the treatment to 
which their persecutors have subjected them. They have, de- 
clared them to be a burden and a misfortune to the State, with 
no more grounds than confident ignorance, envy, and the 
desire to have " their spoil for a prey," require to justify them- 
selves. 

In the history and literature of the Jews a very different tale 
is to be read. When once the work of the conquest of Canaan 
was effected, — and not many European nations have the right to 
sit in judgment upon Israel in such a case, — no State of ancient 
times was more hospitable to the stranger. On the basis of 
certain fundamental principles of morality, there was one law of 
right, of protection and love for him and the native. In the 
very Temple of the God of Israel, the prayers of the stranger 
were welcome. The aboriginal races lived side by side with the 
conquerors on terms of good-humoured tolerance. When the 
Jewish State fell, though they neither forgot Jerusalem nor gave 
up the hope of a return thither, it was in no rancorous spirit 
that the Jews lived among their captors. " Seek the peace of 
the city whither I have caused you to be carried captive," was 
the Divine message which Jeremiah delivered to his exiled 
brethren, " and pray for it unto the Lord, for in the peace 
thereof shall you have peace." 

Their Temple a second time destroyed, and their land a prey 
to the enemy, the Jews once more found a home in Babylon, 
where the Parthians presented an invincible front to the passion 
of Rome for universal empire. Congregations and schools arose, 



366 National Life and Thought. 

the produce of whose labours forms to this hour the chief intel- 
lectual food upon which Rabbinic Judaism is fed all the world 
over. Yet so completely did affection for their new country 
become rooted within them, that one of their leaders of that 
period could maintain that " he who quits Babylon for Palestine 
transgresses a positive command." l 

The language of the country became not merely the vernacular 
•of the Jew; it acquired a quasi-sacred character, and prayers 
composed in the Aramaic dialect found their way into the liturgy 
of the Synagogue, and have been retained there to the present 
time. Then, too, the principle was established which is expressed 
in the Talmudic maxim, "The law of the State is everywhere 
binding law for the Jew " 2 — a principle that ever since has regu- 
lated the relation of the Jew towards the Gentile communities 
among whom he has been domiciled, and is itself an explanation 
of the singularly law-abiding character of the whole race. 

Without loosening his hold upon his own distinctive laws and 
customs, the Jew never at any time was lacking in the conscious- 
ness of a union with a larger world outside his own race. He 
read the lesson of the unity of mankind in the first pages of his 
Bible. The central doctrine of his religious system — the Unity of 
God — drove that belief still deeper into his heart. The brother- 
hood of man was the logical consequence of the fatherhood 
of God. "When God created Adam," says the Talmud, "He 
gathered dust from all parts of the earth, and with it formed the 
parent of the human race." 3 Stripped of its garb of allegory, the 
saying means that the whole world is the home of man, that the 
very diversities in the families of mankind are within the original 
design of the Creator, and, as complementary one to the other, 
help to establish their essential unity. It was no empty rhetoric 
that spoke in these words. One practical result of such a theory 
was, for example, the doctrine : " To rob a heathen is worse than 
robbing an Israelite, because, in addition to the breach of the 
great moral law, there is the profanation of the name of God." 4 
Where will you find a broader and loftier spirit of religious toler- 
ance than that which is contained in this comment of the Midrash 
on Canticles : " 'My beloved went down to feed in the gardens, 
and to gather lilies' — 'the gardens' — these are the Gentiles 
throughout the world, and 'the lilies' — these are the righteous 
among them " ? Or in this, from a work that was the offspring of 

1 Berachoth 24b. 2 Baba Kama 113a. 

3 Sanhedrim 38a. 4 Tosefta Baba Kama 10. 



Jews in their Relation to Other Races. 367 

one of the darkest periods of Israel's fortunes : " I call heaven 
and earth to witness that, whether it be Israelite or Gentile, man 
or woman, everything depends upon the deeds that are done, how 
far the Holy Spirit shall rest upon a mortal ? " x 

That not all utterances concerning non-Israelites are conceived 
in the same strain, will be readily imagined. The relation of Jews 
to other races has, of course, been regulated to some extent by the 
relation of other races to the Jews ; and the one will never be 
_properly understood and be done justice to until the other has been 
thoroughly grasped. It is, however, no part of my purpose this 
;afternoon to recite to you a chapter out of the Romance of 
Jewish Martyrdom. Read only what Christians, like Dollinger 
and Schleiden, have written on this subject, and you will not need 
to listen to the grim and ghastly record from Jewish lips. This 
only I will say, that in nothing has Christianity been so un-Christ 
like as in its treatment of the Jew, from Church fathers, and 
popes, and grand inquisitors, and Catholic emperors, to Pro- 
testant reformers, statesmen and rulers, and that there never was 
a religion which suffered so little as Christianity during its estab- 
lishment compared with the suffering it has itself caused since — 
two centuries of intermittent persecution endured, against sixteen 
centuries of incessant persecution inflicted. 

Until the end of the last century, all attempts on the part of 
the more tolerant among the Gentiles to assert for the Jewish race 
the status of full brother to other races proved abortive. Even 
the British Parliament, which, in 1753, passed the Jews' Naturali- 
sation Bill, was led to revoke its own righteous action the follow- 
ing year, in obedience to clerical prejudice, commercial jealousy, 
and popular clamour. It is to the French Revolution that the 
Jews owe their improved position in the modern world. That 
prolific parent of good and evil has at least deserved well of 
them. It was the first to do justice, full and unequivocal, to those 
whom every other great political movement passed over as too 
insignificant or too contemptible to be taken into account. 
Mirabeau and the Abbe" Gregoire, the one in his desire to secu- 
larise the State, the other in his policy of Christianising the 
Revolution, as our historian Graetz 2 puts it, both urged on a move- 
ment which, in an incredibly short space of time, succeeded in 
effecting the complete emancipation of all the Jews under the rule 
of the Republic. On the 17th September 1791, the National As- 
sembly decreed the abolition of every exceptional enactment pre- 

1 Tana d'be Elijahu 9. 2 See vol. xi., ch. 5. 



368 National Life and Thought. 

viously in force against them, and thus made them by law what they 
had previously been in heart, citizens of their country. He who 
started as the child, afterwards to become the master of the 
Revolution, proclaimed the same great principles of religious 
equality wherever his victorious eagles penetrated. Since that 
dawn of a better time, the light has spread more and more, though 
even now it is only here and there that it has shone forth unto 
the perfect day. 

If, now, you direct your attention to the attitude of Jews towards 
their neighbours, you are made aware of a most extraordinary, 
and, in its degree, unique combination ; you perceive a national 
individuality of singular strength and distinctiveness, side by side 
with an equally remarkable power of adaptation to the varying 
circumstances of their existence. I admit it sounds like a contra- 
diction ; but reality is often a potent reconciler of theoretical 
impossibilities, and here, at all events, is a contradiction which is 
being acted out before our very eyes, one that in the play and 
alternation of forces furnishes all the elements for one of the 
most impressive dramas of humanity. One side of the national 
character has been depicted by Goethe in words to which all the 
greater weight may be attached, seeing that they breathe anything 
but a spirit of partiality towards the Israelitish people : " At the 
Judgment-Seat of God, it is not asked whether this is the best, 
the most excellent nation, but only whether it lasts, whether it 
has endured. There is little good in the Israelitish people, as its 
leaders, judges, chiefs, and prophets a thousand times reproach- 
fully declared ; it possesses few virtues and most of the faults of 
other nations ; but in self-reliance, steadfastness, valour, and, 
when all this could not serve, in obstinate toughness, it has no 
match. It is the most perseverant nation on earth ; it was, it is, 
it will be to glorify the name of the Lord through all ages." 1 
True as much of this undoubtedly is, it is not the whole truth 
regarding the Jewish people. The other side of their character is 
not less recognisable. They have the power of adapting them- 
selves to their surroundings with a rapidity and completeness that 
is altogether unparalleled. I do not propose to enter into the 
philosophical inquiry, What constitutes a nation ? But I do 
venture to contest the assumption that it requires so many 
generations of residence on the soil, and the ability to show that 
your ancestors, upon arriving on these shores, slew the ill-prepared 
natives, and took violent possession of their land and other effects, 

1 Wilhelm Meisters Wandeijahre, II. 2. 






Jews in their Relation to Other Races. 369 

in order to constitute you a true Englishman. A man's country 
is the place where he enjoys the protection of the laws, where he 
pursues his vocation without let or hindrance, where his home is 
fixed, hallowed by the tender ties of family life, where the interests 
and the welfare of his neighbours have become interwoven with 
his own, where he can worship God according to the dictates of 
his conscience, and where his life is able to perfect itself in every 
■direction. Given these conditions, or the chief of them, and the 
Jew not only becomes soon mentally acclimatised, and assimilates 
himself to the society by which he is surrounded, but reproduces 
its distinguishing characteristics in an accentuated form in him- 
self, becoming, as at this day he is often found to be, more 
German than the Germans, more French than the French, more 
English than the English. By way of pendant to the judgment 
of Goethe, let me cite a noteworthy utterance of one of the most 
gifted women of our race, a valued friend of Emerson's, one whose 
brilliant career closed far too soon for her people's good, though 
not too early for her fame. " Every student of the Hebrew lan- 
guage," says Emma Lazarus in her Epistles to the Hebrews, "is 
aware that we have, in the conjugations of our verbs, a mode 
known as the intensive voice, which, by means of an almost im- 
perceptible modification of vowel points, intensifies the meaning 
of the primitive root. A similar significance seems to attach to 
the Jews themselves in connection with the people among whom 
they dwell. They are the intensive form of any nationality whose 
language they adopt." 

Is it well to have kept a people like this at arm's length ? It 
is not alone the Jews who have been sufferers by such a policy. 
What monasticism did in one direction by withdrawing for many 
centuries many of the best intellects and noblest characters from 
the active business of life, that was done in another by the 
systematic repression of the special genius of the Jew, and his 
exclusion from all national fellowship. Both systems have tended 
to the world's own impoverishment. 

Leaving generalisations, however, let us regard the Jews in 
their relation to some of those countries where they have found 
a home. As types, let us take three, as widely varied as possible 
— -Russia, Germany, England. 

It is, of course, notorious that the Jews of Russia are, with 
comparatively few exceptions, but loosely attached to their fellow- 
subjects, and to the country which is to them in the place of a 
fatherland. But the marvel is not so much that they are loosely 

2 A 



37® National Life and Thought. 

attached, as that they are attached at all. It is not easy to form 
a conception of the wretchedness in which a system of legalised 
inhumanity has steeped the lives of between three and four mil- 
lions of our fellow-men. From his birth upwards, the Russo- 
Polish Jew is the object of a persecution which, were it not that 
he has inherited a vast capacity for endurance from generations 
of luckless ancestors, would soon suffice to crush the whole man 
within him. Almost every avenue to an honourable livelihood is 
closed against him. Barriers are put up in his own country, 
beyond which he dare not pass. Certain provinces are set apart 
for his domicile — they are an enlarged ghetto, outside whose 
boundaries he strays at his peril. The whole of the interior is 
shut against him, as though he were a 'leper. When he sets foot 
in it, it is on his way to Siberia. He is enough of a foreigner to 
be denied the rights of other Russians ; he is just Russian enough 
to be heavily taxed. If he has sufficient means to pay for it, he 
may purchase at a high price the privilege of being allowed to 
establish himself in the capital, or in a few other important towns. 
But this elevation has no power of raising his wife to the same 
status, and should he leave his property to her, the State will not 
lend itself to so unnatural a proceeding, and takes charge of the 
inheritance in perpetuity. If he is drawn for the army, and dis- 
appoints the string of hungry officials by not bribing them to 
secure his exemption from military service, he and his family bid 
each other farewell, without much hope of meeting each other 
on this side the grave. With his fellow-recruits he is drafted off 
to the other extremity of the colossal empire ; for it is the Russian 
principle — and in this it is quite impartial in its treatment of Jews 
and Christians — not to foster anything like local attachments in 
its soldiery. Needless to say that he has no chance of rising 
from the ranks, whatever his military qualities may be. 

But what is resented with especial severity is the thirst for 
knowledge which, despite all repression, the Jew so often manifests. 
He presents himself, perhaps fully qualified in all other respects, 
for admission into a Russian University. The chances are that 
the doors will be closed against him, as the percentage fixed by 
law of Jewish to other students has already been reached, or has 
been lowered by a recent Ukase. That the Jew should become 
more cultured than his taskmaster is not to be thought of. He 
cannot even be a Christian any longer in peace. The temptation 
has been, and still remains, very strong to rid one's self by a 
single effort, a single concession (the greatest, however, which 



Jews in their Relation to Other Races. 37 r 

a man of honour can make) of all these galling disabilities. 
With this object, and in order to ease the transition to their own 
conscience, a few Jews have occasionally gone over to Luther- 
anism, such a step being deemed not so gross a breach with 
former habits of thought as joining the Russian Church, with 
its image and relic worship. Within quite recent years, how- 
ever, Lutheranism has been declared no resting-place for a Jew 
who wishes to be considered a Russian, and there is now, in 
a very mundane sense, no salvation for him outside the pale 
of the Orthodox Russian Church. Add to all this, that a 
persistent scorn, more biting and degrading than the knout, 
dogs him at every turn and movement of his life, and that the 
knowledge that there is one section of the populace against 
whom all manner of crimes can be perpetrated without disgrace 
and with comparative impunity, is apt to demoralise the most 
virtuously disposed of people, and it will be seen that the fate 
of the Russian Jews is about as melancholy and as desperate 
as that to which any portion of the human race is at this moment 
condemned. The hardest thing about the whole business re- 
mains to be spoken : these despised outcasts are in many ways, 
intellectually and morally, the superiors of their tormentors. 
If any one considers this a mere piece of racial or religious 
bias, let him read the address of Archbishop Nicanor at the 
University of Odessa in September last. No professional ad- 
vocate of the Jewish cause could have more effectively con- 
trasted the Russian and the Jewish characters, or could have 
spoken in more glowing language of the industry, the sobriety, 
the self-denial, the parental and filial devotion, the love of 
learning, and the unswerving attachment to their faith of these 
same Russian Jews. 

But they are charged with displaying an invincible spirit of 
exclusiveness, and with taking to ignoble pursuits, to the voca- 
tions of the usurer and the innkeeper, who make their profit 
out of the follies and the vices of their fellow-men. — You shut 
up a man in prison without cause, and accuse him of being 
unsociable. You take from him every serviceable brick and 
stone, and bid him build his hut of mud, and then you are 
surprised that he has soiled his hands. 

What an opportunity now lies before the Autocrat of all the 
Russias and his ministers ! True, there is danger in making 
concessions to an awakening people : is there no danger in re- 
fusing them? By a single exercise of his authority, the Czar 



37 2 National Life and Thought. 

could break every chain that has so long fettered and disfigured 
his Jewish subjects. And he, or whoever may do it, would have 
his reward in the bursting forth of a pent-up spirit of loyalty 
and patriotism, for there is not a people on earth more quick to 
forgive injuries, and more grateful for kindnesses, than the Jews. 
But truth makes its way slowly to a monarch's ear. Have not 
others also long been crying for justice in that land where the east 
and the west have met, and barbarism and civilisation are so 
strangely mingled ? We must not complain if their claims take 
precedence over ours. The Sun of Freedom has always shone 
last into the gloomy recesses of the Ghetto. 

Turn now to Germany. The problem there is different in 
kind, but in certain respects even more acute. The Jews are 
accused, strange to say, of diametrically opposite faults. On 
the one hand, they are condemned for hemming themselves in 
with a tribal exclusiveness which nothing can pierce, for placing 
around them an icy barrier no warmth of neighbourly love can 
melt ; on the other hand, they are charged with being too much 
en evidence, with wanting to take their share and more of public 
affairs, with desiring to make themselves indispensable to their 
country. It would, perhaps, not be a bad thing to let the ob- 
jectors settle their differences, which seem to fairly cancel each 
other, and then to deal with the remainder, if any. 

The attitude of the Teutonic anti-Semite recalls a grim story 
narrated of the Emperor Hadrian in an old rabbinical work. x 
A Jew, happening one day to meet the Emperor, greeted him 
respectfully. "Who art thou?" said Hadrian. "A Jew," was 
the humble reply. " And thou, a Jew, art so bold as to greet the 
Emperor ! Thou shalt pay for it with thy head." Aware of the 
luckless fate of his brother Israelite, another Jew, who chanced 
to cross the Emperor's path, thought it wise to show more dis- 
cretion, and omitted the customary sign of homage. Hadrian 
stopped him, and again asked, "Who art thou?" "A Jew." 
" And thou darest to pass the Emperor without greeting him ! 
Off with his head!" The counsellors who accompanied him, 
perplexed at this strange procedure, expressed their astonish- 
ment that such punishment should be dealt out alike to him 
who did and to him who did not greet the Emperor. " Think 
you," said he, "-Hadrian needs to be taught how to rid himself 
of those whom he hates ? " Something of the same spirit pre- 
vails among those who, in their hostility to the Jews, are utterly 

1 Midrash Echah. 



Jews in their Relation to Other Races. 373. 

regardless of the inconsistency and even the absurdity of their 
charges against them. It is enough that they hate them. Need 
those who hate be logical as well ? 

Nominally, indeed, all Germans are equal before the law. But,, 
during the last fifteen years or so, anti-Semitism, that hideous 
recrudescence of the worst passions of the middle ages, that 
" stain upon the German name," as the Emperor Frederick called 
it, has striven to place and to keep the Jew under a relentless 
social ban. There is no more cruel instrument of torture than 
social persecution and contempt can become in unscrupulous 
hands. One illustration may suffice. In Germany, the army is 
everything. The empire exists for the army, though in official 
parlance the army is said to exist for the empire. Under the 
law of conscription, the Jews have to render their period of 
service exactly like the rest of the population. Perfectly just. 
But of all the Hebrews who have ever served in the army, and 
they are to be numbered by tens of thousands, one or two only 
have been permitted, and that with the utmost difficulty, to rise to 
the rank of officer. They may shed their blood on the battlefield, 
may make the heaviest sacrifices for the good of the fatherland, 
as they did in the great war of Liberation as well as in 1870; 
they may render the most heroic, though less conspicuous, ser- 
vices in giving medical aid *to the wounded on the field and in 
hospitals ; but that they should wear the epaulettes of an officer 
would be a not-to-be-thought-of enormity. Not even baptism can 
wash the old Adam out of the Jewish soldier. The corps of 
officers will have none of him in any shape or colour. 

The Jews of Germany have their faults — faults that especially 
offend because they are so conspicuously within view of all the 
world : they do not know how to bear with becoming modesty 
their recently acquired wealth and power. But their worst fault 
is that they are too clever, while they lack the grace which Mr 
Lang's Prince Prigio acquired after many adventures, of being 
clever without seeming so. In England, when the proletariat was 
enfranchised, the cry among sensible politicians was: "Now let 
us educate our masters." In Germany, even before the first 
instalments of liberty and equality were doled out to them, the 
Jews began to educate themselves. With the widening of their 
opportunities in our own time, there has gone an educational 
development that has in it something truly astounding. With 
a total population, including Prussia, of about 45,000,000, Ger- 
many had, in 1887, 562,000 Jews, or 1 Jew to 80 of the general. 



374 National Life and Thought. 

population. One would expect something like the same propor- 
tion to be maintained between Jews and non-Jews in the educa- 
tional world. What, however, is the actual case ? Among 1326 
University Professors (exclusive of those who hold chairs in 
theology) in the German Empire, there, are 98 Jews, or about 
one-fourteenth instead of one-eightieth of the total : of 529 Privat- 
Docenten, 84 are Jews, or about one-sixth. In these capacities 
they hold distinguished positions in the various faculties of medi- 
cine, law, philosophy, arts, science, and agriculture. A similar 
state of things is observable in the High Schools. Taking Berlin 
as an example, with a population of 1,400,000, including 67,000 
Jews, we find that the total number of students, boys and girls, 
in the gymnasium, Real - Schulen, Fach - Schulen, and Hohere 
Tochter - Schulen amounts to 23,481; of these 18,666 are 
Christian, and 4,816 are Jewish students — that is, the Jews are 
four or five times as numerous as their proportion to the rest 
of the population would lead one to expect ; or, to state it in 
another way, every thousand Christian inhabitants of the Prussian 
capital furnish 14 students to these schools ; every thousand 
Jewish inhabitants supply 72 students. 

I take these statistics not from a Jewish, but from a Christian 
source, the Anti-Semiten Katechismus, published in Leipsic in 
1887 — a book cunningly designed to provide Jew-baiters with all 
weapons of offence in a handy form, and to rouse the animosity 
and indignation of German Christians against everything Jewish. 
Its most triumphant passages are those that point to the status of 
the Jews in the educational world as a peril to the State. Surely 
we may be pardoned if, while accepting the figures cited by our 
enemies as accurate, we desire no higher praise than is involved 
in a condemnation based upon such grounds. 

Now, contrast the position of the Jew in both Germany and 
Russia with that which he holds in England. The English are 
slow to move in the direction of any political change, but when 
the time is ripe for it, and the change is made, it is made 
generously, ungrudgingly, and without irritating reservations. It 
is not surprising to those who know how to read the Jewish 
character that, among the many races and religions contained 
within the limits of the British Empire, there is none that 
has more completely identified itself with the national senti- 
ments and aspirations than the Jews. Making allowance 
for the difficulties of undoing the results of long periods of 
misrule, and of inherited tendencies consequent in great mea- 



Jews in their Relation to Other Races. 375 

sure upon such misrule, the transformation has been astounding 
at once in its rapidity and in its thoroughness. In every walk 
of life, Jews are taking their share : in professions, in commerce, in 
handicrafts. They have developed a degree of public spirit and 
a civic excellence for which they were little credited before the 
experiment had been made. They are to be found among the 
the foremost in every philanthropic and educational movement, in 
every undertaking tending to the national welfare and honour. 
It would be difficult to find within the whole range of modern 
history a more perfect realisation than the Jews of Great Britain 
present of Mr. Freeman's theory concerning the influence which 
an adopting community is able to exercise upon its adopted mem- 
bers : " It cannot change their blood ; it cannot give them new 
natural forefathers ; but it may do everything short of this — it 
may make them in speech, in feeling, in thought, and in habit, 
genuine members of the community which has artificially made 
them its own." 1 

Perhaps the clearest proof of the manner in which the Jews 
have assimilated the national life of this country is their attitude 
in regard to politics. On the supposition, into the merits of 
which this is not the occasion to enter, that the division into 
political parties is a good thing for this country, the Jews con- 
tribute in their measure to the general benefit. They are the 
appanage of no political party ; they are to be found in every 
one, reflecting not unfairly the differences of opinion prevailing 
in the various constituencies themselves. Of course this would 
be impossible if their emancipation here had been an incomplete 
one. As it is, their interests are identical with those of the rest 
of the population. There is, fortunately, no Jewish question to 
distract their attention from the wider duties of citizenship. Ill 
would it fare with a Jewish clergyman who should venture, from 
his pulpit or elsewhere, to dictate to his congregants how they 
should or how they should not vote. 

Just now, indeed, the public mind is strangely agitated by an 
industrial question in which the mass of immigrants of the Jewish 
race and faith are mainly concerned. I believe the agitation 
will, before long, die a natural death. The saving common 
sense of the British people will not suffer fresh disabilities to 
be invented for, and to be imposed upon, one of the most law- 
abiding sections of the population. It is one thing to protect 
them against themselves, as others have had to be protected, 

1 " Race and Language," by Edward A. Freeman. 



376 National Life and Thought. 

by improved factory legislation ; it is another to condemn them 
and their fellows to the dismal fate which certainly will befall 
them if England for the first time reverses its traditional policy 
in their case. It is not conceivable that the land whose boast 
it used to be that it afforded an asylum impartially to kings 
fleeing from their fickle subjects, and to subjects fleeing from 
tyrannical kings, will shut its gates upon those who are drawn 
hither by the same law of nature as that which bids a plant 
seek the light and the air. 

But you ask, perhaps, apart from the present relations of the 
Jews towards other races among whom they have found a home, 
have they any thought or hope of ultimate independence as a 
nationality with a territorial base and a political centre? Is 
Palestine still the Land of Promise to the house of Israel? I 
wish I could answer that inquiry in the name of all my brethren 
with a single voice. Upon no question, unfortunately, are 
opinions more widely divided, though upon none has the teaching 
of the Synagogue from time immemorial been more unanimous, 
decided, and emphatic. Leaving aside those vacant souls, whose 
conception of happiness is to be saved the trouble of thinking, 
and the responsibility of believing, the Jewish camp is divided 
into two parties. There are those among us who have neither 
heart nor mind for a restored Jewish state and a revived Jewish 
nationality. The whole notion is uncongenial to them. They 
will not pray for it, nor hope for it. The ancient memories have 
died within them, stifled by the weight of their new prosperity. 
They dispose of the bare suggestion with a smile, and quote the 
well-worn jest of the wealthy Parisian Jew who declared that, 
when the throne of David was re-occupied by one of his de- 
scendants, he would make application for the post of ambassador 
of his Judaic majesty at the Court of Paris. But it would be a 
grave error to suppose that such a method of regarding the 
destiny of Israel had altogether displaced the faith of centuries — ■ 
a faith sealed with blood and tears, a faith that lent the one 
poetic charm to the dark and dreary lives of fifty generations of 
our fathers. There is still a goodly band of brethren in whom 
that faith is as full of vitality to-day as ever it was in Israel's 
history. Every time they open their Bible or their Prayer-Book, 
the sacred flame is fed within them. With a keen eye they watch 
the progress of events in the East, note with glad satisfaction that 
the Jewish population of Palestine has trebled within the last 
half-century, that agricultural colonies are springing up on all 



Jews in tJieir Relation to other Races. 377 

sides, and that the exiled children of Judah no longer seek the 
land of their fathers merely to let their bones mingle with the 
hallowed soil. Tears of genuine sorrow and of passionate yearn- 
ing still flow at the recital on the anniversary of the destruction 
of the Temple of elegies like those of the Castilian Jehudah 
Halevi : — 

Zion, 

Hast thou no greeting for thy prisoned sons, 

That seek thy peace, the remnant of thy flock ? 

I would pour forth my soul upon each spot 

Where once upon thy youths God's spirit breathed : 

Prostrate upon thy soil now let me fall, 

Embrace thy stones, and love thy very dust. 

vShall food and drink delight me, when I see 

Thy lions torn by dogs ? What joy to me 

Shall daylight bring if with it I behold 

The ravens feasting on thy eagles' flesh ? 

But where thy God himself made choice to dwell 

A blest abode thy children yet shall find. 

If you ask me, Where are the men to come from who are to 
bring about this revolution, not in the career alone, but within the 
very hearts of a nation, who are to vanquish the indifference, to 
purify the sordid aims, to enlarge the narrow hopes, that make up 
the lives of Jewish as of other Philistines, I answer, I do not know. 
But I know that the same question would have remained un- 
answered if it had been put before the stirrings of the pulses of 
the national idea was felt in Greece or in Italy, before the genius 
of a Byron or a Mazzini rekindled the extinguished hopes and 
ambitions of) these nations. 

Nor is it easy to say how this end is to be brought about. Two 
oaths, says a doctor of the Talmud, God imposes upon Israel, 1 
First, that they shall not seek the restoration of their land by 
means of violence, and next, that they will not rebel against the 
nations among whom they dwell. That is to say, it is not to 
physical force, but to the growth of moral influences, that we are 
to look for the realisation of our ideals. " Not by force, nor by 
might, but by My Spirit, saith the Lord." It is in the Jewish 
race itself that the breath ot enthusiasm is needed, without which 
no nation ever worked out, or deserved to accomplish its own 
regeneration. If, in contemplating the actual condition of mind 
of multitudes of his brethren, the believer in the destinies of Israel 
does not always meet with a sympathetic response, he is not dis- 

1 Cethuboth ma. 



378 National Life and Thought. 

mayed or disheartened ; he looks to a higher than earthly source 
for the vivifying impulse, and, face to face with the apathy and 
the ridicule of the world, he prepares to fall in with the train of 
thought to which the poetess, who has already enlightened us on 
one side of the Jewish character, gives utterance in the " New 
Ezekiel : " — 

What ! Can these dead bones live, whose sap is dried 

By twenty scorching centuries of wrong ? 
Is this the House of Israel whose pride 

Is as a tale that's told, an ancient song ? 
Are these ignoble relics all that live 

Of Psalmist, priest, and prophet ? Can the breath 
Of very heaven bid these bones revive, 

Open the graves, and close the ribs of death ? 
Yea, Prophecy, the Lord hath said again : 

Say to the wind, Come forth and breathe afresh, 
Even that they may live upon these slain, 

And bone to bone shall leap, and flesh to flesh. 
The spirit is not dead, proclaim the word. 

Where lay dead bones a host of armed men stand ! 
I ope your graves, My people, saith the Lord, 

And I shall place you living in your land. 

And the other peoples of the earth, have they anything to tear 
from the realisation of these hopes ? Which of them will be 
losers ? Will not all of them rather be gainers by the reconstitu- 
tion of a community which, without abandoning either its own 
character or its mission, " carries the culture and sympathies of 
every great nation in its bosom," and which has no heart for a 
future of national glory apart from the glory and the welfare of 
mankind ? 



XXI. 

THE GYPSIES. 

F. H. GROOME. 

I CONFESS I was somewhat amused at being asked to lecture 
on the Politics and National Aspirations of the Gypsies. 
For the Gypsies have no politics ; they have less than no national 
aspirations. What is the Gypsies' fatherland? Egypt, say the 
Gypsies; India, say Gypsiologists — of Egypt and of India the 
Gypsies are equally ignorant. And yet with something Indian 
they are thoroughly conversant — their mother-tongue. Is there 
any man here who has served in India as soldier or civilian ? 
Let him, on leaving this hall, walk southward to Battersea, west- 
ward to the Potteries in Notting Hill, or far eastward to Wan- 
stead Flats, and go into any tavern there ; the chances are, 
sooner or later, he will light on some tawney-faced men, dis- 
coursing in what at first may sound like gibberish, but in which, 
if he listen closely, he will presently recognise familiar Hindu- 
stani terms, as chi'iri, "knife," or pdni, "water." Those tawney 
faced men will be Gypsies ; their speech bewrayeth them. Yet 
tax them with being Gypsies, they will surely deny it ; for there 
is, they know, a prejudice against Gypsies, even as in Scotland 
there is a prejudice against natives of Paisley. Two Scotchmen 
were travelling in a railway carriage. One of them, a Glasgow 
man, said presently, "Ye'll be frae Greenock, I'm thinkin'?" 
" Na, I'm no frae Greenock." " Ye'll be frae Renfrew, then ? " 
"Na, I'm no jeest frae Renfrew." "Man, ye'll no be frae 
Paisley?" "Ay; but, sure as deith, I couldna help it." That 
is pretty much the Gypsy's feeling, only he will be more reti- 
cent ; for barely a century since it was death, by law at least, to 
have been born a Gypsy. 

People ask me sometimes, "What is a Gypsy? Is not every- 
one a Gypsy who lives in a tent or a caravan ? " Certainly not ; 
no more than a cat who takes up her quarters in a dog-kennel 
becomes a dog. True, tent-dwelling is the typical Gypsy manner 

379 



380 National Life and Thought. 

of life ; still, there are thousands of Gypsies who pass all their 
lives within four walls ; as also there are thousands of vagrants 
who are not Gypsies who have not a drop of the blood or one 
word of the language. " Well, then," I am asked, " but are 
not all Gypsies dark ? " To which I answer, Certainly, the 
typical Gypsy, the full-blooded Gypsy, is dark; still, I have 
known unquestionable Gypsies who are fair, even red-headed. 
Thus, the ultimate test is the Gypsy or Rdmani language, a 
language unwritten in books, but handed down by word of 
mouth from generation to generation ; a language whose secret 
has been jealously guarded, so that few, very few, but Gypsies 
can speak it. Hence, if a Gypsy is accosted by a stranger in 
Rdmani, he jumps at once to the conclusion that that stranger 
must be a Gypsy. 

A friend of mine, a clergyman, who has long been a student of 
Rdmani, was a master, some years ago, in a public school. One 
day he was walking from the schoolhouse to his home, arrayed in 
college cap and gown, when he saw an old Gypsy woman sitting, 
outside his gate, with a pile of baskets. " Kiishto divvus, Dya" 
(Good day, mother), he said to her. She looked at him reproach- 
fully, exclaiming, "Pretty Gypsy you, to go dressed that monkey 
fashion ! But there, Gypsies have took to queer ways nowadays ! " 

I was myself at Scarborough once. I was going out to a 
picnic, rather a big affair ; and I was walking on the Esplanade, 
waiting for the carriages, and smoking a cigar, when I saw an old 
knife-grinder, grinding away at a pair of scissors. I had a good 
look at him as I went past, and then I turned again, and had a 
better look. He certainly was a Gypsy. So, " Shar shan, borV r 
(How d'ye do, mate ?), I said to him. He dropped the scissors, 
crying, " Lord bless us all, and I thought you was a gentleman. 
How de do, boy ? " And then we fell into discourse. 

Another time I was at Westminster, when I saw two tinkers, 
and a look was enough to tell me they were Gypsies. One was 
tall, hook-nosed, and elderly; the other a slim, good-looking 
young fellow; but both were the colour of a copper tea-kettle. 
So, coming up by them presently, " How d'ye do ? " said I in 
Rdmani. And the tall one answered, "And how are you, my 
brother ? I haven't set eyes on you since I don't know when." 
Which seemed likely enough, because he had never seen me in 
his life. "No," I said, "it is a goodish while." And as we 
walked on talking, I learnt they were two of the Lovells, living 
at Battersea. By-and-by Mr Hooknose says, " You'll take a 



The Gypsies. 381 

glass with us, brother?" So we went into a bar, and first be 
paid for glasses, and next I paid for glasses. And then : " Yo u 
haven't been long out, brother ? " " No ; not very long." " Seven 
years, wasn't it, brother?" "Seven years it was." "About a 
horse, brother?" "Ay, about a horse." After which I came 
away, leaving my two acquaintances persuaded that I was some 
Gypsy or other (to this day I know not who) that had got seven 
years' imprisonment for horse-stealing. Not wholly flattering to 
myself; still, they did not mean it unkindly. 

But I wouldn't have you go away with the idea that a Gypsy 
takes every strange Gypsy for a horse-thief. There are Gypsies 
and Gypsies, good and bad, rich and poor, well-educated and 
ignorant. I know of one who is a clergyman ; another, in the 
Staffordshire Potteries, has founded a rival to the Salvation Army; 
in the United States there are Gypsy landowners of great wealth 
and intelligence (one recently left a fortune there of a million 
sterling) ; in the south of France there is a Gypsy horse-dealer, 
who has sent all his sons to the university ; in Wales, in Hungary, 
and in Russia the Gypsy musicians are the musicians of the 
country. Nor, though, as I said before, the Gypsies are reticent 
as to their Gypsy birth, must you fancy they are at heart the least 
ashamed of it. Nothing of the kind. From his cradle upwards 
— if ever he possessed a cradle — the Gypsy child thus might 
parody some well-known lines : — 

" I thank the goodness and the grace, 
That on my birth hath smiled ; 
And made me in this Gentile land 
A happy Gypsy child. " 

No saying is oftener in the Gypsy mouth than this : — " There's 
nothing worse than nasty gaiijoes " — gaujoes meaning "Gentiles," 
or all who have not had the privilege of Gypsy birth. 

Isn't it strange, then, to reflect that, less than two centuries 
since, the Gentiles were hanging the Gypsies for the mere fact of 
their birth — nay, even hanged Gentiles who dared to consort with 
Gypsies. Here in England, at Aylesbury, in 1577, Rowland 
Gabriel and Katherine Diego — a woman, mark you — were hanged 
for " feloniously keeping company with other vagabonds, vulgarly 
called and calling themselves Egyptians, and counterfeiting, trans- 
forming, and altering themselves in dress, language, and behaviour." 
At Durham, in 1592, five men were hanged for "being Egyptians." 
At Bury St Edmunds, thirteen Gypsies were executed shortly 
before the Restoration, and others at Stafford shortly after it. 



382 National Life and Thought. 

So late even as 181 9 (only seventy years ago), it was carried 
unanimously at the Norfolk Quarter Sessions that all Egyptians 
are punishable by imprisonment and whipping. In 1827, the 
judge at Worcester Assizes announced the determination of him- 
self and his brother judges to execute horse-thieves, especially 
Gypsies ; and in 1864, at Hayle, in Cornwall, seven Gypsies were 
charged before the Rev. Uriah Tonkin with the heinous offence 
of " sleeping under tents," and were sentenced to three weeks' 
imprisonment with hard labour. These criminals were a mother 
and her six children, aged twenty, sixteen, fifteen, thirteen, ten, 
and eight years. 

In England, however, a pardon was granted in 1591 to Robert 
Hilton, and in 1594 to William Stanley, Francis Brewarton, and 
John Weekes for the felony of calling themselves Egyptians ; and 
England throughout was almost merciful compared with Scotland. 
Witness the following jottings from Scotch records. Four of the 
Faas were hanged in 1611 ; two Faas and a Bailie in 16 16; six 
Faas and two others in 1624, when also, "some days later, there 
were brought to trial Ellen Faa, widow of Captain Faa, Lucretia 
Faa, and other women, to the number of eleven, all of whom 
were in like manner convicted, and condemned to be drowned in 
the Nor' Loch of Edinburgh," where to-day are the beautiful 
Princes Street Gardens. In 1636 the Sheriff of Haddington 
passed doom on a whole company — " the men to be hanged, and 
the women to be drowned ; and such of the women as has chil- 
dren to be scourged through the burgh of Haddington, and burnt 
in the cheek." Then, in 1698, seven Bailies were executed, as were 
two more in 17 14; and in 1701 James M'Pherson, James Gordon, 
and Peter and Donald Brown were hanged at Banff, the sheriff 
further ordaining that "the three young rogues now in prison 
this day have their ears cropt, be publicly scourged through the 
town of Banff, be burnt upon the cheek by the executioner, and 
be banished the shire for ever under pain of death." This James 
M'Pherson was rather a notable character. He had been leader 
of twenty-seven armed followers, with a piper playing at their 
head ; and his target and huge mediaeval two-handed sword are 
preserved at Duff House. His fiddle-neck is an heir-loom in the 
Cluny-Macpherson family. Burns tells us how — 

" Sae rantinly, sae wantonly, 
Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
He played a spring, and danced it round 
Below the gallows tree." 



The Gypsies. 383 

And relics more precious than either sword or fiddle-neck are 
his rude, reckless " Rant," and the beautiful air to which he set 
the same. He played it as he walked to execution, and, at the 
gallows foot, proffered his instrument to who would take it, but, 
no man venturing, snapt it across his knee. 

Now observe, I pray you, that in all these cases the crime was 
not murder or pillage, but the being what God had made them, 
or, as the law put it, being "called, known, held, and reputed 
Egyptians." So late as 1770, those words formed part of the 
indictment brought against two Gypsies, who were hanged on 
Linlithgow Bridge. When I think of that pitiless legislation. I 
am reminded of the cruel old Norfolk gardener. He was hoeing 
one day, and a frog hopped out before him. " I'll larn you to be 
a frog," said crabbed Roger, and hoed it forthwith in pieces. So 
" I'll larn you to be Gypsies," said British lawgivers, and the 
gallows was their means of education. 

It was ten times worse on the Continent. In Roumania, till 
1856, the Gypsies (200,000 in number) were slaves, cruelly and 
barbarously treated. "In the houses of their masters," wrote 
the British Consul, "they are employed in the lowest offices, 
live in the cellars, have the lash continually applied to them, and 
are still [in 1855] subjected to the iron collar and a kind of 
spiked iron mask or helmet, which they are obliged to wear as 
a mark of punishment and degradation for every petty offence." 
Roumania, you will remember, was one of those down-trodden 
nationalities of whose wrongs we have heard so much. In the 
French Basque country, in 1802, the Gypsy bands around 
Bayonne and Mauleon were caught by night as in a net, huddled 
on shipboard, and landed presently on the coast of Africa. And 
in Germany, for two whole centuries, the Gypsies were hunted 
down like wild beasts. In 1720, in the day's "bag" of one 
Rhenish potentate, among deer, wild boars, and other game, 
occurs this entry : — " Item, a Gypsy woman, with her sucking 
child." 

In startling contrast to this persecution, the Gypsies have, 
during five centuries, been often countenanced by persons of 
the highest rank. On the Continent, they received letters of 
protection more than once from Pope and Emperor; and to-day 
in Austria, the Archduke Joseph is a prince among Romany 
Ryes (or " Gypsy gentlemen "), as Gypsies call the lovers of their 
race. In England, about 15 18, Thomas, Earl of Surrey, enter- 
tained " Gyptians " at Tendring Hall, Suffolk ; in Scotland, in 



384 National Life and Thought. 

1540, James V. entered into a formal league or treaty with his 
"lovit John Faw, Lord and Earl of Little Egypt," granting him 
authority to execute justice upon his company and folk, conform 
to the laws of Egypt. There, too, in 1559, as he was riding one 
day from Edinburgh to Roslin, Sir William Sinclair " delivered 
an Egyptian from the gibbet in the Burgh Moor, ready to be 
strangled. On which account," adds good Father Hay, " the 
whole body of Gypsies were of old accustomed to gather in the 
marshes of Roslin, where they acted several plays during the 
months of May and June. There were two towers which were 
allowed them for their residence, the one called Robin Hood, 
the other Little John." I might multiply similar instances; 
enough, that in 1750 the then Prince and Princess of Wales 
drove to visit the Gypsy queen, Bridget, in Norwood Forest ; and 
that Prince Victor of Hohenlohe has sat in the Gypsy tent of 
Lazarus Petulengro at the Liverpool Exhibition of 1886. 

Now, how are we to reconcile this contradiction, that the 
Gypsies should thus have been persecuted with the one hand, 
and caressed with the other. Well, I have no hesitation in 
affirming that the persecution was largely due to the imputation 
of crimes, of which the Gypsies are not, were never, guilty. You 
yourselves will have heard that they are kidnappers, stealers of 
children. It is an old charge, older than John Bunyan's days, 
who likens his feelings as a sinner to those of a child carried off 
by the Gypsies. Chief Justice Popham, who was born in 1531, 
is said, while quite a child, to have been stolen by a band of 
Gypsies, and for some months or years — on this point authorities 
differ — to have been detained by them. It is further alleged 
that they disfigured him, and burnt on his left arm a cabalistic 
mark. In a Scotch witchcraft trial of 1586 there is mention of 
a Mr William Smith, who, besides being the king's smith, was 
also a 'great scholar and doctor of medicine.' He, it seems, 
had, when eight years of age, been 'taken away by an Egyptian 
into Egypt, which Egyptian was a giant, where he remained ten 
years, and then came home.' At the time of the trial he was 
away again — this time with the ' good neighbours,' or fairies. Or 
there was the famous Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of 
Nations. He, too, as a boy is said to have been carried off by 
Gypsies, and not to have been recovered for several hours. Or 
there was the alleged abduction of Elizabeth Canning, which 
made such a stir in London in 1759 ; or that of Elizabeth Kellen 
in 1802 ; or that of Anna Bockler in 1872. The last was the only 



The Gypsies. 385 

child of a rich Pomeranian farmer, and no fewer than forty-seven 
German Gypsies were imprisoned on suspicion of having kidnapped 
her. A twelvemonth later, as luck would have it, her corpse was 
discovered in one of her father's barns, where the farm-boy, her 
murderer, had buried it. That case is typical of many more. 
Elizabeth Canning turned out a rank impostor ; so, too, did the 
other Elizabeth. Indeed, my investigations of every alleged in- 
stance of kidnapping have always resulted in a verdict of acquittal, 
or, at most, in a 'not proven.' Gypsies have too many children 
of their own to trouble themselves with other folk's brats. But 
in almost every Gypsy family, the purest even, there will be one 
white sheep ; one child of the dozen will be comparatively fair, 
will bring out some far-away strain of Gentile blood. And 
strangers noticing this child have jumped to the conclusion that 
a fair Gypsy is a rarer fowl than a black swan. " They must have 
stolen it," is the cry ; and hence, in all likelihood, arose the myth. 
A yet more monstrous charge has been that of cannibalism. 
In the old edition of Chambers' Encyclopedia, it was gravely stated 
that Gypsies " were or are wont to eat their parents ; " and in 1782, 
little more than a century since, forty-five Gypsies, men and 
women, were beheaded, broken on the wheel, quartered alive, 
or hanged for cannibalism. Among them were their Bishop 
and their "Harum Pasha," the ornaments in whose cap were 
valued at £600. The manner of their detection was thus : 
Arrested first by way of wise precaution, they were racked till 
they confessed to theft and murder; then were brought to the 
spot where they said their victims were buried, and, no victims 
forthcoming, were promptly racked again. "We ate them," at 
last was their despairing cry ; and straightway the Gypsies were 
hurried to the scaffold ; straightway the newspapers rang with 
blood-curdling narratives of Gypsy cannibalism. Then, when it 
all was over, the Emperor sent down a commission from Vienna, 
the outcome of whose investigations was that nobody was missing, 
that no one had been murdered — but the Gypsies. This was in 
Hungary, but even in England, in 1859, a judge seems to have 
entertained a similar suspicion. In that year, at the York Assizes, 
a Gypsy lad, Guilliers Heron, was tried for a robbery, of which, 
by the way, he was innocent. " One of the prisoner's brothers " 
(I quote from the Times) said they were all at tea with the 
prisoner at five o'clock in their tent ; and when asked what they 
had to eat, he said they had an urchin cooked. His Lordship 
(Mr Justice Byles) : " What do you say you had — cooked urchin ? " 



386 National Life and Thought. 

Gypsy : " Yes, cooked urchin. I'm wery partial to cooked urchin." 
His lordship's mind, says the reporter, seemed to be filled with 
horrible misgivings, until it was explained to him that urchin was a 
provincialism for "hedgehog," and that hedgehogs are a favourite 
Gypsy delicacy. 

I am not here to hold a brief for the Gypsies. I do not 
pretend they are immaculate. Crimes of violence have been 
rare among them : murder almost unknown. And I could give 
you some striking instances of Gypsy honesty, for Gypsies are 
trustworthy, in proportion as they are trusted. But 1 freely own 
that there still are Gypsies who are " light-fingered, and use 
picking," even as there were when Andrew Boorde wrote about 
them, and that was two hundred and fifty years ago. Then, too, 
the older Gypsies would sometimes make off with another man's 
halter, and the other man's horse at the end of it — a crime, 
however, now obsolete in these days of telegraphs and the rural 
police. And there is fortune-telling, with which Gypsies still 
delude the credulous. I certainly am not going to say one word 
in defence of fortune-telling ; it is quite as silly, if not quite so 
mischievous, as table-turning ; silly, although an African traveller 
of my acquaintance is firmly persuaded of its truth. Years ago 
he had the lines of his hand read by a Gypsy girl near London. 
He was not a doctor then, he had no idea of ever becoming a 
traveller, yet she told him (so he tells me) that a doctor he was 
to become, that he was to cross the seas, and wander in strange 
lands, was to be in peril of his life, but should come safe through, 
return, and marry, and so forth. And once in the heart of Africa 
he was in deadly peril of his life, for he stood with a noose round 
his neck, in a crowd of infuriated savages ; but he thought of the 
Gypsy girl's words, and how all she had said had come true, and 
he laughed, feeling sure of his safety. And seeing him laugh, 
they released him ; they dared not harm a man so resolute. So, 
at least, my friend told me, a few weeks since, at our club. In 
return, I told him another fortune-telling story of another friend 
of mine, an artist, who visited some Gypsies at Dunbar. They 
told him his name, and where he came from, though he had only 
just landed a week before from Melbourne. He was greatly im- 
pressed with their powers, was quite certain there must be some- 
thing in palmistry. However, a few months after, he met the 
same Gypsies in Fife, and, of course, he again consulted the 
oracle. " Look here," he said to Mrs Petulengro, " that first 
time you told me my name, and I gave you five shillings : now 



The Gypsies. 387 

this time, I'll give you ten if you'll let me into the secret of 
your power." " You will, my gentleman ? " Certainly he would. 
"Well, then, my gentleman, don't you remember coming into 
the tent, and sitting down a bit ; then you got up, and went out- 
side with one of the boys to have a look round the camp, but 
you left your umbrella behind, with your name and address on 
it ? " So there was that mystery solved ; but to think he had 
never hit on the solution ! 

Gypsies never offer to tell me my fortune ; once, indeed, I took 
a young lady to have hers told, and my Gypsy friends were half 
indignant with me. Didn't I know better, they asked, than to go 
and encourage such foolishness. Mere foolishness often it is, a 
passing jest ; but fortune-telling, or rather fortune-seeking, has 
sometimes assumed a very much darker form. Thus, in the trial, 
three hundred years ago at Edinburgh, of Lady Fowlis for witch- 
craft, incantation, sorcery, and poisoning, we learn that she had 
sent one of her servants to the Egyptians, to have knowledge of 
them how to poison the young Laird. The errand must have 
miscarried, since the poison was got from a merchant in Aberdeen. 
And in the Times for February and March 1862, there was a long 
account of a police case against a Gypsy woman, Georgina Lee, 
twenty years old, who appeared in the dock with a baby in her 
arms.' She and her husband camped, it seems, on Hounslow 
Heath, and one day she called at a gentleman's house near by. 
She got telling the servant-girls' fortunes, told the cook what she 
knew to be true, that she was to marry a Marquis. Then the 
drawing-room bell rang ; the lady too wanted to have her fortune 
read, wished to know if she should be married again within the 
twelvemonth, and finished by offering Georgina a sovereign for 
something that would kill her present husband. So, on Friday, 
Georgina returned with a powder wrapped up in a paper, and the 
lady then told her that, if it did any good, she would give her 
ten shillings. But Georgina wanted cash down, and, the lady 
refusing, got hustled out of the house. In the middle of which 
hustling, the happy husband comes upon the scene, and gives 
Mrs Lee in charge for attempting to obtain money on false pre- 
tences. False they undoubtedly were, for the powder turned out 
to be nothing but harmless chalk. So, after a fortnight of remands, 
Georgina Lee was sentenced to three months' hard labour ; the 
lady got — nothing. 

Yes, fortune-telling has brought the fortune-tellers into trouble 
as often as favour. But the Gypsies have higher claims on our 



388 National Life and Thought. 

consideration. Imprimis, they are excellent company, able to 
converse with prince or peasant, and to give a good answer to 
each, for they have seen much, .and know how to describe what 
they have seen. Secondly, to the Gypsies we are indebted for, it 
may be, three-fourths of our fairy tales. M. Jourdain, you will 
remember, was surprised to find that all his life long he had been 
speaking prose without knowing it. You also may be surprised to 
learn that from earliest childhood you and your grandmothers 
(especially your grandmothers) have been hearing or telling Indian 
fairy tales. Yet, according to some very high authorities, our 
most familiar nursery stories — Puss in Boots, Cinderella, and all 
the rest of them, are as certainly Indian in origin as is the 
Romani or Gypsy language. No, says Mr Lang, that cannot be ; 
it is impossible that stories which orginated in India can have 
reached Siberia, and Europe, and Africa, and America, by oral 
transmission, and within the historical period. Impossible, quotha. 
The Gypsies came originally from India, and even during the two 
last centuries we find large bands of Gypsies journeying from 
Poland to China, from Turkey to Sweden, from Hungary to 
Algeria, from Corfu to Liverpool, from Portugal to Brazil, and from 
England to the States, New Zealand, and Australia. And these 
ubiquitous, much- wandering Gypsies possess versions of all our 
familiar fairy-tales, only versions often much better than our own. 
In Turkey, Gypsies have long filled the role of professional story- 
tellers ; nor even in London is that role unknown to them, for it 
was in St James's Street that Mr Campbell of Islay picked up two 
Gypsy tinkers, from whom he and Sir George Dasent extracted 
eight good folk-tales, all about princesses, magic hats and sticks, 
castles of copper and silver and gold, and such-like. Now, one 
of the Gypsies, Mr Campbell informs us, played the fiddle by ear, 
and was commonly sent for to wakes, where he entertained the 
company with stories, which comes very near the professional 
story-teller. 

Thirdly, the race has a marvellous faculty for music. Some 
of you very likely have heard the Blue Hungarian Band. That 
band consists wholly of Gypsies. The Abbe Liszt — a high 
authority — ascribed to the Gypsies the creation of Hungary's 
national music, and certain it is that over all South-Eastern 
Europe, every musician is almost certainly a Gypsy, and every 
Gypsy is certainly a musician. That is only partially true in 
England. I know an estate in Norfolk, where there were great 
rejoicings when the son and heir came of age, and his father, 



The Gypsies. 389 

Lord Omnium, promised a sovereign to every Gypsy fiddler who 
should put in an appearance. Twenty appeared, each man with his 
violin, and a grand show they made as they played all altogether, 
standing in a semicircle. " But," one of them told me years 
afterwards, " there were only twelve on 'em really knew how to 
fiddle ; the rest of us had soaped our fiddle-strings, so as not to 
make no noise when we drew the bow over them. But we each 
got the sovereign." Welsh Gypsies, as a rule, are more musical 
than their English brethren, and many of the celebrated Welsh 
harpists are Gypsies, whilst the Gypsy Aliens were the most 
famous of the Border bagpipers. 

Playing cards again, are by some supposed to have been 
brought into Europe by Gypsies from the east. The tented 
musicians, refugees from Hungary and Lorraine, who about 
1555 discovered the Stourbridge fire-clay, were very possibly 
Gypsies. To Gypsies also have been ascribed the saddler's 
craft, and the introduction into Europe of gunpowder. But, even 
though we concede to the Gypsies the credit of having introduced 
folk-tales, the czardas, playing cards, glass-making, saddlery, and 
artillery, yet we may not have half acknowledged our full in- 
debtedness. 

To the Jewish race, now so dispersed, so despised, you owe 
religion — all your hopes for the life to come. What if to the 
Gypsy race, similarly dispersed, and ten times more despised, you 
owe all, or well-nigh all, that renders this present life liveable — a 
knowledge of the metals? Without the metals life would now 
seem impossible. Every mouthful of bread we eat, every article 
of clothing we wear, the house we live in — these all have in some 
way or other demanded the use of metal. Yet we know that 
three thousand years ago the dwellers here in Great Britain had 
absolutely no knowledge of the metals, had no better implements 
than tools of stone. Then, says Sir John Lubbock, the art of 
working in bronze was introduced into Europe from the East by a 
small-handed race like the Egyptians or the Hindus — a nomade 
race, too, who practised the self-same methods in different lands, 
and who, whether acquainted or not with iron, were exclusively 
workers in bronze. What race this was he leaves an unsolved 
problem, except that it certainly was not the Phoenicians. But 
several foreign archaeologists have been led independently to the 
conclusion that this unknown race, small-handed like the Gypsies, 
nomade like the Gypsies, and, like the Gypsies, immigrants from 
the East, was indeed none other than the Gypsy race. It looks 



39° National Life and Thought. 

at first a daring paradox, but, examined closer, the paradox sen- 
sibly diminishes. To begin with, we know absolutely nothing of 
the date of the Gypsies' first appearance in Europe. It may have 
been one thousand years ago, it may have been three thousand ; 
all we can say is, that history is silent, and that its silence speaks 
for a /re-historic arrival of the Gypsies. Secondly, at the present 
day, the Gypsies in South-eastern Europe may be said to mono- 
polise the blacksmith's craft and the coppersmith's. In Tran- 
sylvania, for instance, if you want your horse shod, you have to 
send him to a Gypsy farrier ; if your kettle has a hole in it, you 
get it mended by a Gypsy tinker. Indeed, so exclusively is the 
smith's a Gypsy (and therefore a degrading) trade, that in Mon- 
tenegro, when in 1872 the Government established an arsenal, no 
native Montenegrins could be induced to fill its well-paid posts. 
And a traveller tells me that in Asia Minor it is just the same : 
the Gypsies have still a like monopoly of metal -working, the 
native shoeing-smith being no true smith in our sense at all. 
He is supplied by Gypsies with horseshoes of various sizes, and 
merely hammers them on. Now, it is hard to conceive how the 
Gypsies could have usurped so all -important an industry, far 
easier to imagine that it must have been always theirs. Thirdly, 
even at the present day, the Gypsy coppersmiths of South-eastern 
Europe will forsake the land of their birth, and for seven years 
wander all over Europe, everywhere manufacturing copper vessels. 
Even now they must often arrive at remote country places where 
the methods of working in copper are clean unknown; as it is 
now, it may well have been two thousand, three thousand years 
before. Fourthly, nearly all the early notices of Gypsies refer to 
them as metal-workers. Thus, an Austrian monk wrote of them 
almost seven centuries ago as " cold smiths," workers, that is, in 
the cold metal. "They have no home or country," he says; 
" everywhere they are found alike ; they wander through the 
world, abusing people with their knaveries." Again, in the old 
Byzantine writers, we light on mention of certain so-called komo- 
dromoi (roamers, that is, through the villages). These komo- 
dromoi, it appears, were both copper and goldsmiths, wandering 
through the country, and using bellows made of skins, like those 
of some Greek Gypsies described by a German traveller in 1497. 
Now, if these komodromoi were Gypsies, as there is every reason 
to suppose they were, they are strangely connected by tradition 
with the central event in the world's history — the Crucifixion. 
For, according to a Greek apocryphal gospel, as also to a legend 



The Gypsies. 391 

still current in Montenegro, it was a komodromos or Gypsy who 
forged the nails for the Crucifixion ; wherefore the whole race has 
been thenceforth accursed of heaven. The Gypsies of Alsace and 
Lithuania have a tradition of their own, opposed to, and in all 
likelihood devised expressly to refute, this legend. How there were 
two Jew brothers, Schmul and Rom-Schmul. The first of them 
exulted at the Crucifixion ; the other would gladly have saved 
our Lord from death, and, finding. that impossible, did what little 
he could — stole one of the nails. So it came about that Christ's 
feet must be placed one over the other, and fastened with a 
single nail. And Schmul remained a Jew; but Rom-Schmul 
turned Christian, and became the founder of the whole Rdmani 
race. This Gypsy legend offers a plausible explanation of what 
has long puzzled antiquaries, that in the most ancient crucifixes 
there are always four nails, in later ones only three. The earliest 
known example of this daring innovation is a copper crucifix of 
Byzantine workmanship, dating from the close of the 12th cen- 
tury. Now, if Gypsies had then, as now, a practical monopoly 
of metal-working in South-eastern Europe, this crucifix must have 
been fashioned by a Gypsy, when the three nails would be an 
easily intelligible protest against the Gentile libel that those nails 
were forged by the founder of his line. 

Be that as it may, I have shown that the Gypsies have possibly 
been greater benefactors to the Gentiles than even was Watt or 
Stevenson. I have shown, too, that the Gentiles rewarded them 
— as benefactors often are rewarded — with persecution. For surely 
any wrong-doings of the Gypsies fade into insignificance by the 
side of the wrongs that were done them. How, then, have the 
Gypsies emerged from that persecution ? None the better for it, 
of that one may be positive. Still, as they possess no written 
histories to preserve the recollection of their wrongs, so to-day 
their feeling towards Gentiles is one more of contempt than of 
hatred. The Gentile seems to the Gypsy less clever than himself, 
a poor, credulous fool, who believes in fortune-telling, and who 
can generally be done in a horse bargain. Indeed, this odd sense 
of superiority is latent (or blatant) in even the poorest Gypsies. 

They are not patriotic — why should they be? During last 
century many were impressed, but they do not make good 
soldiers or sailors. In a Spanish campaign years ago, two soldiers 
dropped out of the opposing ranks, and the tide of battle rolled 
by them. Presently one half rose from the ground, and espying 
the other's corpse, as he fancied, crept forward to plunder. But 



392 National Life and Thought. 

the other dead fox was not to be caught like that. He, too, rose, 
and then suddenly there were cries of recognition — " Zincalo ! " 
" Romani chal ! " For the one was a Spanish, the other an 
Austrian, Gypsy. Five minutes later they were sharing a flask of 
schnaps, and drinking damnation to the Spanish and Austrian 
services. 

Still, the Gypsies are no cowards when they have got to fight 
for themselves. They have shown that often, from Tom Winter's 
day down to Jim Mace's. But if you want Gypsy fights, you must 
go to George Borrow. There is the one, described to him by 
Jasper Petulengro, between the Bow Street runner and the Gypsy. 
The runner knew that his man would pass through a certain lane, 
so he posted himself there one cold, moonlight night. And, after 
long waiting, he " heard a gate slam, and then the low stamping 
of horses ; and presently he saw two men on horseback coming 
towards the lane through the field behind the gate. The man who 
rode foremost was a tall, big fellow, the very man he was in quest 
of. The other was a smaller chap, not so small either, but alight, 
wiry fellow, and a proper master of his hands when he sees occa- 
sion for using them. Well, brother, the foremost man came to 
the gate, reached at the hank, undid it, and rode through, holding 
it open for the other. Before, however, the other could follow, 
out bolted the runner from behind the tree, kicked the gate to 
with his foot, and, seizing the big man on horseback, ' You are my 
prisoner,' said he The Gypsy clubbed his whip, and aimed a 
blow at the runner, which, if it had hit him on the skull, as was 
meant, would very likely have cracked it. But the runner received 
it partly on his staff, and then, seeing what kind of customer he 
had to deal with, dropped his staff and seized the Gypsy with both 
his hands, who forthwith spurred his horse, hoping, by doing so, 
either to break away from him, or fling him down. But it would 
not do ; the runner held on like a bull-dog, so that the Gypsy, to 
escape being hauled to the ground, suddenly flung himself off the 
saddle. And then happened in that lane such a struggle between 
those two — the Gypsy and the runner — as I suppose will never 
happen again. But you must have heard of it ; every one heard 
of it ; every one has heard of the fight between the Bow Street 
runner and the Gypsy." 

" No," says Borrow, " I never heard of it till now." 
"All England rung with it, brother. There never was a better 
match than between those two. The runner was somewhat the 
stronger — all those runners are strong fellows — and a great deal 



The Gypsies. 393 

cooler, for all of that sort are wondrous cool people. He had, how- 
ever, to do with one who knew full well how to take his own part. 
The Gypsy fought the runner, brother, in the old Roman fashion. 
He bit, he kicked, and screamed like a wild cat, casting foam 
from his mouth, and fire from his eyes. Sometimes he was be- 
neath the runner's legs, and sometimes he was upon his shoulders. 
What the runner found most difficult was to get a firm hold of 
the Gypsy, for no sooner did he seize him by any part of his 
wearing apparel, than the Gypsy either tore himself away, or 
contrived to slip out of it, so that in a little time the Gypsy 
was three parts naked ; and as for holding him by the body, it 
was out of the question, for he was as slippery as an eel. At last 
the runner seized him by the Belcher handkerchief, which he wore 
in a knot round his neck, and, do what the Gypsy might, he 
could not free himself. And when the runner saw that, it gave 
him fresh heart, no doubt. ' It's no use,' he said, ' you had 
better give in. Hold out your hands for the darbies, or I'll 
throttle you.'" 

"And what," asks Borrow, " did the other chap do who came 
with the Gypsy ? " 

" I sat still on my horse, brother." 

" You ! " says Borrow ; " were you the man ? " 

" I was he, brother." 

" And why didn't you help your comrade ? " 

" I have fought in the ring, brother." 

" And what had fighting in the ring to do with fighting in the 
lane ? " 

" You mean not fighting. A great deal, brother ; it taught me 
to prize fair play. When I fought Staffordshire Dick, t'other side 
of London, I was alone, brother. Not a Gypsy to back me, and 
he had all his brother pals about him. But they gave me fair 
play, brother, and I beat Staffordshire Dick, which I could not 
have done had they put one finger on his side the scale, for he 
was as good a man as myself, or nearly so. Now, brother, had I 
but bent a finger in favour of the Gypsy, the runner would never 
have come alive out of the lane, but I did not, for I thought to 
myself, fair play is a precious stone." 

Are Englishmen and Gypsies changed since then ? It seems 
that Englishmen are. 1 

1 This was written just after the prize fight in Belgium between Slavin and 
Smith, when the Australian was brutally mauled by English roughs. 

2 C 



394 National Life and Thought. 

Here in London there must be hundreds of Gypsies ; here in 
London there must be hundreds, thousands of cage birds. As 
the caged lark to the free, wild lark, so is the city Gypsy to his 
country brother. The former may have some smattering of 
book-learning, the latter not know big B from a bull's foot ; else 
the life-long tent-dweller in quiet lanes has small cause to envy 
the Battersea hawker. It is easy sneering at the " noble savage," 
but an open-air life does possess an ennobling influence. And 
though a Gypsy boy may know nothing of the three R's, and 
even less of all your schoolboard 'ologies, he can give you the 
(unscientific) names of every bird that flies, and every herb that 
grows, which knowledge Solomon himself was proud of. To 
step out of one's tent right into the star-lit night, to fall asleep 
to the murmur of a brook, all one's life long to lie in nature's 
bosom — that life, with few cares about Heaven, is Heaven already. 
But, like other wild creatures, our country Gypsies are threatened 
with extinction. Enclosure acts have struck a deadly blow at 
English Gypsydom, driving the wanderers from grassy hedgeside 
and breezy common to the dingiest purlieus of our dingiest 
towns. A pity for them ; a pity, too, for poet and painter. One 
morning, some years ago, a poet was crossing Snowdon with a 
friend. " She was not what is technically called a lady, yet she 
was both tall and, in her way, handsome, and was far more 
clever than many of those who might look down upon her, for 
her speculative and her practical abilities were equally remark- 
able. Besides being the first palmist of her time, she had the 
reputation of being able to make more clothes-pegs in an hour, 
and sell more, than any other woman in England. The grandeur 
of that Snowdon sunrise was such as can only be seen about 
once in a lifetime, and could never be given by any pen or 
pencil. 'You don't seem to enjoy it a bit,' was the irritated 
remark of the poet to the Gypsy woman, who stood quite silent, 
and apparently deaf to the rhapsodies in which he had been 
indulging, ' Don't injiy it, don't I ? ' said she, removing her 
pipe. ' You injiy talkin' about it. I injiy lettin' it soak in.' " 
No London Gypsy may hope to look upon a Snowdon sunrise. 

I should have liked to tell you more about Gypsy life, that life 
which the song says is a merry one. And so it is ; but even 
Gypsies die, and, therefore, their life is not without its sorrows. 
Eight years ago come May, a letter reached me in Edinburgh 
from old Lementina Lovell. There is never very much in 
Gypsies' letters beyond loves and greetings, and such-like. This 



The Gypsies. 395 

letter was no exception ; it ended thus : " Lancelot [her youngest 
son] sends his duty, and would take it very kind in you to look 
in, if so be as you are round this way, for he is dying." As luck 
would have it, I had nothing just then on hand, and was wanting 
a holiday • so I started that night for Loamshire. Next morning, 
exactly at sunrise, I reached the little roadside station, from which 
I had twelve miles to walk to the Lovells' encampment. It was 
a delicate, clear morning, sweet with the scent of hawthorn and 
hyacinth, and as I walked, I heard my first cuckoo on the 
right hand — sure omen of coming good. My way took me 
down into the valley, where lies the sleepy little town of Clun, 
and up out of the valley on to the hills which separate 
England from Wales, and on which, as I knew, the Lovells 
were encamped. I had still half a mile to go, when a Gypsy 
child met me — little Ariselo Lovell, nephew to Lancelot. I 
have said that all Gypsies know the Gypsy language. This 
child is the one exception — he is deaf and dumb. Yet already, 
at six, he had invented an odd sign-language of his own ; 
its sign for me the twirling an imaginary moustache. And now 
in that strange sign-language he tried to acquaint me with his 
uncle's state, then ran on ahead to tell them I was coming. At 
the camp I found a multitude of Gypsies, for all Lancelot's 
brothers and sisters, with their wives, and husbands, and children, 
had gathered from every airt to see him go. All through that 
day they kept coming, the last the grandmother, a little old, old 
woman, who had journeyed a hundred miles. She came into the 
tent where Lancelot lay, sat down on the earth, and, covering 
her head with her mantle, said : " Kino shorn, chawolle " (Little 
children, I am weary). And all that day lay Lancelot, dreamy, 
but conscious, wholly free from pain. Towards evening he said 
to his elder brother, Pyramus : " Play to me." 

How well I remember the scene. 

The tents were pitched upon the western hill-slope. Beside 
them ran Offa's Dike, reared centuries before to keep out the 
Welsh marauders ; the silver Tame flowed beneath ; and beyond 
stretched the beautiful Welsh country, all shimmering through 
the soft blue wood-smoke of the fire that smouldered outside. 
Some sat within the tent, but more on the turf without — the 
children awe-struck, puzzled. The sinking sun slanted through 
the tent-opening, and lighted up Lancelot's face, which was lighted 
up, too, by happy recollections. For Pyramus, the cunning 
fiddler, was playing the dear old Welsh melodies. First, the 



396 National Life and Thought. 

" March of the Men of Harlech," and then from its stirring tones 
he slid imperceptibly into the tender "Shepherd of Snowdon." 
And as he played he wept, the big, strong man. "Play that 
again, my Pyramus," said Lancelot. And Pyramus did play it 
again, but not quite to the end, for, as the last bar opened, 
Lancelot died. Then there was lamentation in the tents of 
Egypt. 



Printed at The Edinburgh Press, 9 and 11 Young Street. 



INDEX. 



Aargau taken by Swiss, 272. 
Abbas Pasha, 337. 
Aberdeen, Lord, and the Czar, 312. 
Abolition of class privilege in Hungary, 

45- 
Abolition of Serfdom in Belgium, 253. 
Abolition of the Corn Laws, 249. 
Aborigines of Sweden, 2©i. 
Abraham's visit to Egypt, 329. 
Absolutism in Austria overthrown by 

Viennese, 25. 
Absolutism in Denmark, 232. 
Adam created, 366. 
Adam weary of Paradise, 157. 
Adam, Sir F., on Switzerland, 277. 
Adaptability of the Jews, 368. 
Adrianople, peace of, 312. 
Adulteration, 64. 
Adventures in Spain, 170. 
^Esthetic influences in Spain, 170. 
Africa and Italy, 149. 
Agriculture in Austria, 30. 
Agriculture in Denmark, 227. 
Agriculture in Hungary, 49. 
Agriculture in Italy, 137. 
Agriculture in Spain, 167. 
Alas, Leopoldo, 174. 
Albert of Hapsburg, 270. 
Alcuin on naval warfare, 217. 
Alexander the Great ends Egypt's 

mission, 332. 
Alexander II., 99. 
Alexander II. and peasant proprietors, 

120. 
Alexander VI., 241. 
Alexandria, 324. 
Alexandria founded, 332. 
Alexandrian Library, 332. 
Althing in Iceland, 233. 
America discovered by Norwegians, 

183. 
American Secession War, 66. 
Amer-ul-Muminin, 305. 
Ammon, Oasis of, 324. 
Amusements in Germany, 82. 
Ancient inhabitants of Belgium, 251. 
Anglican Church, 245. 
Antique agriculture of Spain, 167. 
Antiquity of Armenia, 1. 
Antiquity of Egypt, 325. 
Anti-Semiten Katechismus, 374. 
Anti-Semitism in Germany, 373. 



Apathy of rulers for trade in Turkey, 
306. 

Appenzell joins Swiss Confederation, 
273- 

Arab conquest of Egypt, 334. 

Arabi, 340. 

Arabs and Arabic, 309. 

Arbitration, 66. 

Archimandrite Cyril, 297. 

Architectural resemblance in India and 
Egypt, 326. 

Architecture in Italy, 136. 

Area of Belgium, 265. 

Area of Denmark, 217. 

Area of Egypt, 323. 

Area of Italy, 136. 

Area of Russia, 87. 

Area of Switzerland, 267. 

Argyropolis in Armenia, 299. 

Armenia and a Russian occupation, 
16. 

Armenia and British trade, 17. 

Armenia and Russia, 6. 

Armenia as a nation, 1. 

Armenia, by M. Sevasly, 1. 

Armenia, divisions of, 5. 

Armenia, extinction of, as a nation, 3. 

Armenia for Armenians, 16. 

Armenia, government in, 13. 

Armenia, Greeks in, 299. 

Armenia, its antiquity, I. 

Armenia, its derivation, 2. 

Armenia, its fertility, 5. 

Armenian charge against Turkey, 7. 

Armenian Christian and military ser- 
vice, 13. 

Armenian claims upon England, 17. 

Armenian girls legally abducted, 8. 

Armenian grievances, 6. 

Armenian literature, 5. 

Armenian minerals, 5. 

Armenian press gagged, 13. 

Armenian rivers, 5. 

Armenian three dynasties, 2. 

Armenian usurers, 15. 

Armenian village, system of rape on, 
8. 

Armenian zoology, 5. 

Armenians embrace Christianity, 3. 

Armenians help Crusaders, 3. 

Armenians, famous, 4. 

Arnold, M., 74. 



2 D 



398 



Index. 



Art industry in Denmark, 228. 

Art in Greece, 291. 

Artel, the, 97. 

Assimilative force in Poland, 131. 

Athens and Brindisi, 292. 

Athens, modern, 290. 

Athletics, 74. 

Austria and Belgium, 255. 

Austria and Germany, 24. 

Austria and Great Britain, 27. 

Austria and Hungary, 24-42. 

Austria and Hungary — Misunderstand- 
ings between Governments, 46. 

Austria and Irishmen, 27. 

Austria and Italy, 142, 144. 

Austria and Russia, 30. 

Austria and the War of 1806, 66. 

Austria as the China of Europe, 23. 

Austria, by D. S. Schidrowitz, 19. 

Austria, disparaging remarks about. 19. 

Austria drives back the Turks, 22. 

Austria governed by Autocrats, 27. 

Austria, Jesuits in, 23. 

Austria, late Crown Prince of, 26. 

Austria, modern, 24. 

Austria, not a nation in itself, 24. 

Austria, only favourable notice of, 19. 

Austria, residence of Emperor, 26. 

Austria, the bulwark of Christian Eur- 
ope, 21. 

Austria, the country of the Eastern 
Marches, 21. 

Austria, the Landtage, 29. 

Austria, to-day and yesterday, 24. 

Austrian absolutism overthrown, 25. 

Austrian agriculture, 30. 

Austrian education, 30. 

Austrian land-stewards, 271. 

Austrian manufactures, 30. 

Austrian parliamentary institutions, 29. 

Austrian political backwardness, 23. 

Austrian politics tabooed, 28. 

Austrian population, 27. 

Austrian reaction in 1852, 28. 

Austrian religion, 29. 

Austrian watering-places, 31. 

Austro-Hungarian monarchy, 28. 

Austro - Hungarian monarchy estab- 
lished, 47. 

Autocracy in Austia, 27. 

Babenbergers, 22. 

Backward state of Turkey, 303. 

Bale joins Swiss Confederation, 273. 

Baltic provinces, Germans in, 90. 

Baltic provinces, the prevailing popula- 
tion of, 90. 

Baneful influence of Imperial harem, 
306. 



Barn-lock, 207. 

Battle of Athenry, 241. 

Battle of Bannockburn, 241. 

Battle of Bravollr, 202. 

Battle of Grandson, 273. 

Battle of Koosovo, 343. 

Battle of Mohacs, 34. 

Battle of Morat, 273. 

Battle of Morgarten, 271. 

Battle of Nancy, 273. 

Battle of Noefels, 272. 

Battle of Sempach, 272, 279, 286. 

Bauchrecht, 119. 

Bazan, Emilia Pardo, 175. 

Beales, Edmund, and Poland, 113. 

Becquer, 172. 

Beer-houses in Germany, 76. 

Belgse of Caesar, 251. 

Belgian characteristics, 265. 

Belgian charters, 252. 

Belgian clergy, 258. 

Belgian constitution, 256. 

Belgian electorate, 262. 

Belgian House of Representatives, 257. 

Belgian patriotism, 265. 

Belgian political parties, 258. 

Belgian provincial and communal 

laws, 258. 
Belgian serfdom abolished, 253. 
Belgian trade, 253. 
Belgian working men, 264. 
Belgium and France, 255. 
Belgium and the united provinces, 256. 
Belgium assigned to Austria, 255. 
Belgium, by Alfred Wathelet, 251. 
Belgium Independent, 256. 
Belgium's ancient inhabitants, 257. 
Bent, J. Theodore, on Greece, 289. 
Berlin, 83. 

Berlin Treaty and Article 61, 7, 15. 
Berne, 268. 

Berne joins confederates, 271. 
Bernstorf the younger, 222. 
Bible translated into Swedish, 208. 
Bilini, 99. 

Bindes, Norwegian, 194. 
Binnenhof at the Hague, 238. 
Birch, Dr., on Egypt, 331. 
Birgir Earl, 207. 
Bismark, 56. 

Bismark on the Poles, 131. 
Bjornson, Bjornstgorne, 195, 198. 
Black Sea and Turkey, 313. 
Bohemia and Hungary, union of, 40. 
Bohemia uprising and peasants, 238. 
Boris Godunov, 95. 
Borrow on the Gypsies, 392. 
Bow Street runner and the Gypsy, 392. 
Brcekstad, H. L., on Norway, 181. 



Index. 



399 



Brander, Dr. George, on Russia, 99. 
Bravollr or Bravalla, Battle of, 202. 
Brindisi and Athens, 292. 
British merchants exempt from Turkish 

jurisdiction, 320. 
British trade and Armenia, 17. 
Brugsch, Bey, on the passage of Red 

Sea, 330. 
Bryce, James, on Armenians, 4. 
Bucharest, Treaty of, 311. 
Buda retaken from the Turks, 41. 
Bulgaria and Russia, 93. 
Bulgaria created, 314. 
Bull, Seflor Don Juan, 161. 
Burgundy, House of, 252. 
Burke on Poland, 116. 
Burnett on Poland in 1807, 1 1 6. 
Byron on Armenia, 4. 
Byzantine Greeks, 100. 

"Caballeria," 163. 

Cairo, 327. 

Cairo built, 335. 

Campbell on fall of Poland, 118. 

Campbell on Poland, 116. 

Canaan, conquest of, 365. 

Cannibalism and Gypsies, 385. 

Canton right, 268. 

Cantons of Switzerland, 268. 

Caps and hats, 210. 

Carlyle and Germany, 54. 

Carlyle on Poland, 116. 

Casimir II., addressed by a deputy, 

124. 
Castilian, the, 166. 
Catherine II., 96, 101. 
Catherine and Turkey, 305, 311. 
Catherine on Poland, 116. 
Catholic Clergy in Belgium, 258. 
Catholicism and Greek Church, 95. 
Catholics in Belgium, 261. 
Causes which led to decline of Ottoman 

Empire, 305. 
Cavendish College, Cambridge, 79. 
Celts, 21. 

Champollion on Coptic language, 334. 
Characteristics, national, accentuated 

by Jews, 369. 
Characteristics of Sweden, 215. 
Charles the Bold and the Swiss, 273. 
Charles V., 58, 254. 
Charles X. and Denmark, 221. 
Charles XII., 209. 
Charles XII. , wars of, disastrous to 

Sweden, 210. 
Charters of Belgium, 252. 
Chesney's History of Russo- Turkish 

Campaigns, 312. 
Chevaliers, portentous shams, 238. 



Chios, tyranny in, 301. 

Chlop, the head of the family, 117. 

Chosen people, 70. 

Christian II., 220. 

Christian Jews in Germany, 373. 

Christianity in Egypt, 333. 

Christianity in Sweden, 202. 

Christianity un-Christlike, 367. 

Christians in Armenia, 8. 

Christians in Turkey and Napoleon, 

.348. 
Christmas Trees in Germany. 70. 
Church ritual and Spanish character, 

171. 
Church, the noblest in Europe, 22. 
Civil war in Hungary, 46. 
Civil war in Switzerland, 272. 
Civilisation, first steps in, 201. 
Cleopatra, 333. 
Clergy in Belgium, 258. 
Clergy in Greece, 295. 
Climate of Italy, 137. 
Colleges and schools in Turkey, 307. 
Collett, C. D., on Armenia, 1. 
Collet t, C. £>., on Why does not the Sick 

Man die? 311. 
Collins, Samuel, 98. 
Cologne, Coleridge on, 81. 
Commerce and adventure of Italians, 

136. 
Communal charters of Belgium, 252. 
Communal movement in Belgium, 253. 
Communes in Switzerland, 285. 
Compulsory universal military service 

adopted in Hungary, 50. 
Conquerors, malady of, 218. 
Conquest of Canaan, 365. 
Conscription in Germany, 63. 
Constantinople and Copenhagen, 311. 
Constantinople, ta!< en by Turks, effects 

of, 93- 
Constantinople taken by the Turks, 

3?4- . 
Constitution of Austria, 27. 
Constitution or Grundlov of Norway, 

185. _ 
Constitution of Sweden, 21 1. 
Constitution of Sweden and England, 

213. _ 
Constitutional government, beginning 

of, in Hungary, 39. 
Consuls in Turkey, 320. 
Convention of Stans, 273. 
Cooked urchin, 385. 
Copenhagen and Constantinople, 311. 
Copernicus, 123. 
Coptic language, 334. 
Cosmopolitan and patriot, 36. 
Council of States in Switzerland, 2761 



40o 



Index. 



Countries, foreign, ignorance of, 53. 
Country houses in Germany, 84. 
Country inns in Spain, 164. 
Courage of Dutch, 248. 
Crime, imputation of, to Gypsies, 

. 383- 
Crime in Galicia, 132. 
Crimean war, 313. 
Crispi Signor, 154. 
Croatia, 45. 

Croatia obtains Home Rule, 48. 
Croato-Serbs in Hungary, 37. 
Crown Prince of Austria, the late, 26. 
Crucifixion and Gypsies, 390. 
Culture, 72. 

Cyril, Archimandrite, 297. 
Czar and Lord Aberdeen, 312. 

Daily life of Norwegians, 194. 

Daily press in Athens, 290. 

Danes at sea, 218. 

Danilo, Prince, assassinated, 353. 

Danilo, Petrovitch, orders massacre of 

Mussulmans, 346. 
Danish agriculture, 227. 
Danish art industries, 228. 
Danish exports and imports, 229. 
Danish manufactures, 228. 
Danish navy founded, 221. 
Danish official insolence in Norway, 

184. 
Danish railways, 229. 
Darwin and Goethe, 78. 
DAzeglio, Massimo, 146. 
Deak, Francis, prepares the ground for 

the achievements of 1848, 44. 
Death of a Gypsy, 394. 
Death of Milosch, 351. 
Decentralisation for Greece, 317. 
De Lavergne, Monsieur, 120. 
Delegations, in Austro-Hungary, 29. 
Democracy in America, 245. 
Democracy in Spain, 170. 
Democratic struggle, 238. 
Denmark and Charles X. of Sweden, 

221. 
Denmark and England, 221. 
Denmark and France, 221. 
Denmark and Germany, 218. 
Denmark and Holstein, 222. 
Denmark and Iceland, by Eirikr Mag- 

nusson, 217. 
Denmark and Russia, 222. 
Denmark, area, 217. 
Denmark, end of absolute monarchy, 

224. 
Denmark, literary and scientific, 229. 
Denmark, the reformation in, 220. 
Denmark's apogee, 218. 



Denmark's constitution, 229. 
Denmark's evolution of constitution, 

217. 
Denmark's material state, 227. 
Denmark's present politics, 229. 
Depopulation of van, 12. 
Depretis, Signor, 154. 
De Vogue, Melchior, on the Russian 

novel, 109. 
Diakos or deacon in Greece, 296. 
Dialect of Holland, 241. 
Dialects of Scandinavia, 215. 
Dicey on Federal State, 275. 
Dickens, Chas., 74. 
"Died of Starvation," 20. 
Diet in Sweden, 212. 
Diets in Austria, 28. 
Dilke, Sir Charles, on Armenia, 16. 
"Dominion was founded in Greece," 

740. 
Donkeys in Spain, 168. 
Dostoievski, 109. 
Drawing taught in Sunday Schools, 

229. 
Du Chaillu on the Viking, 182. 
Duckworth's, Admiral, attempt on 

Constantinople, 311. 
Dulcigno, given to Montenegro, 352. 
Dunajevski, 133. 
Dutch arL, 246. 
Dutch claim freedom of conscience, 

244. 
Dutch courage, 248. 
Dutch grant toleration, 244. 
Dutch Independence, heroes of, 249. 
Dutch Jews, 244. 
Dutch language, 241. 
Dutch Republic, Lessons from, by Pro- 

fessorj. E. Thorold Rogers, 237. 
Dutch struggle with Spain, 242. 
Dynasties, three, of Armenia, 2. 

Early history of Switzerland, 267. 
East, the, and the West, by Lord 

Hanley of Alderly, 321. 
Eastern Roman Empire in seventh 

century, 343. 
Education among the Greeks, 291. 
Education in Austria, 30. 
Education in Germany, 54. 
Education in Hungary, 30-50. 
Education in Germany, 54. 
Education in Norway, 196. 
Education in Servia, 360. 
Education in Sweden, 214. 
Education in Switzerland, 286. 
Education in Thrace, 298. 
Education in Turkey, 307. 
Education of Jews in Germany, 373. 



Index. 



401 



Edwards, Miss, "Thousand Miles up 
the Nile," 329. 

Egypt, a Persian province, 331. 

Egypt, a province of the Baghdad 
Caliphate, 335. 

Egypt, a Roman province, 333. 

Egypt and English, 340. 

Egypt and Greece, 332. 

Egypt and Greek art, 325. 

Egypt and India, architectural resem- 
blance, 326. 

Egypt and Israel, 330. 

Egypt and the Mamelukes, 335. 

Egypt, Arab conquest of, 334. 

Egypt probably of Aryan origin, 
326. 

Egypt, by J. C. M'Coan, 323. 

Egyptian fire eras, 327. 

Egyptian trade, 333. 

Egypt's apogee, 329. 

Egypt's antiquity, 325. 

Egypt's area, 323. 

Egypt's mixed population, 339. 

Egypt's mission ended, 332. 

Egypt's native religion's death blow, 

333- 

Egypt's religion, 331. 
Eidgenosum or confederates, 270. 
Elementary education in Belgium, 261. 
Elizabeth, Queen, and Holland, 243. 
Emancipation of commune.. 98. 
Emancipation of Jews, 367. 
Emancipation of serfs in Russia, 96. 
Emigration from Germany, 63. 
Emigration from Spain, 177. 
Emigration from Switzerland, 286. 
Emmanuel and the Crimea, 143. 
Emmanuel and Sardinia, 143. 
Emmanuel at Novara, 146. 
Enclosure Act and English Gypsydom, 

394- 

England and Austria, 27. 

England and Denmark, 221. 

England and Germany, gain by study 
of each to other, 55. 

England and Greater Greece, 301. 

England and Hungary, analogy be- 
tween, 33. 

England and Poland, trade between, 
127. 

England and Turkey, 301, 309. 

England, first home of liberty, 122. 

England of the East, 33. 

England supports Russia, 318. 

England Turkey's candid friend, 311. 

England a thousand years since, 181. 

English and Norsemen, 181. 

English dissensions, 114. 

English goods in Poland, 128. 



English Government against Dutch 
Republic, 147. 

English in Egypt, 340. 

English interests in Armenia, 17. 

English literature in Germany, 78. 

English merchants in Turkey, 319. 

English nation mainstay of Greek op- 
pressors, 302. 

English policemen, the, 73. 

English tourists in Norway, 198. 

English tourists in Switzerland, 267. 

English want of interest in Germany, 

53- 

Englishmen must needs be cosmopoli- 
tan, 35. 

Englishmen's only curiosity about 
Russia, 107. 

"Eothen " on the Sphinx, 328. 

Esnaf in Servia, 360. 

Eton, Wm., on causes of the decline of 
Turkey, 311. 

European civilisation productive of evil 
in Turkey, 304. 

Europeans in Turkey, 307. 

Exclusiveness charged against Jews, 
37 1- 

Extent of Ottoman Empire, 305. 

Factories in Germany, 84. 
Fair play and Gypsies, 393. 
Fairy tales and Gypsies, 388. 
Fallermayer's theories respecting 

Greeks, 289. 
Famous Armenians, 4. 
Fayoum, valley of, 324. 
Feast days in Spain, 171. 
February, revolution in Paris, 1848, 28. 
Federal Assembly, 276. 
Federal government, Freeman on, 268, 

275, 277- 
Federal Government of Switzerland, 

275- 
Federal Pact, 274. 
Fellaheen, the, 334. 
Ferdinand and Isabella, 168. 
Ferdinand, Emperor, 28. 
Fertility of Servia, 359. 
Feudal idea among freemen unknown 

in Poland, 124. 
Feyjoo, 171. 

Finland lost to Sweden, 211. 
Finland and Russia, 88. 
Finns, the, and Germans, 90. 
First appearance of the Turk in Europe, 

304- 
Fisheries, the great, in Norway, 196. 
Flanders and Roman Church, 239. 
Flemish language, 264. 
Flemish race, its apogee, 254. 



402 



Index. 



Floating in Norway, 197. 

Folkehoiskoler, 196. 

Folketing, 230. 

Folk-kings, 202. 

Forest industry in Norway, 197. 

Fortune-telling, 386. 

France and Belgium, 255-260. 

France and Denmark, 221. 

France and Italy, 142, 150. 

France and the spoliation of Germany, 

60. 
France, its foundation, 57. 
France the apostle of ideas, 123. 
Franchise in Norway, 190. 
Franchise in Servia. 355. 
Franchise in Sweden, 212. 
Francis the Second, 28. 
Franco - German War — conduct of 

Germans, 83. 
Frankfort, 82. 

Franklin class in Sweden, 204. 
Franklin's immunity from taxes, 207. 
Fraternal spirit of Mahometanism, 

314- 

Frederick, Emperor, and anti-Semi- 
tism, 373. 
Frederick the Great, 60. 
Free institutions in Poland, 1 18. 
Freedom among Swedes, 204. 
Freedom of press in Denmark, 222. 
Freedom of trade in Poland, 126. 
Freehold peasantry in Hungary, 49. 
Freeman on an adopting community, 

375- 
Freeman on Federal Government, 268, 

275, 2 77- 
Freethinker in Spain, 169. 
Freethought ruthlessly repressed, 23. 
Freiburg has no Referendum, 285. 
French as a Court language, 87. 
French dissension, 115. 
French ignorance of her neighbours, 

53- 

French Revolution and Jews, 367. 
French Revolution and Switzerland, 

274. 
French Revolution parent of good and 

evil, 367. 
Future of Poland, 133. 
Fyffe on condition of Germany, 115. 



Galdos Perez, 172. 
Galicia, 95, 132. 
Galicia's natural resources, 
Garibaldi, 144. 
Genoese, the, 141. 
Gentile and Jew, 366. 
German amusements, 82. 
German bands, 84. 



133- 



German colonization, 61. 

German competition, 70. 

German country houses, 84. 

German Culture, by Sidney Whitman> 

69. 
German culture, Turgeniefif on, 75. 
German dissension, 115.1" 
German, early history, 57. 
German emigration, 63. 
German Emperors, popularity, 67. 
German factories, 84. 
German, great men, 62. 
German gypsies, 383. 
German influence in Denmark, 220. 
German Jews, 372. 
German officials, 64. 
German princes, 70. 
German public schools, 83. 
German, relative happiness, "]\. 
German self-respect, 83 . 
German superior education, 54. 
German Universities and the people, 

79- 
German unpopularity, 69. 
Germanicus in Egypt, 329. 
Germanization, order of the day in 

Hungary, 47. 
Germans and the Finns, 90. 
Germans in Baltic Provinces, 90. 
Germans in France during the War, 

83- 
Germans in Hungary, 37. 
Germans in Russia, 89. 
Germans in Schleswick, 223. 
Germans peaceful — not aggressive, 60. 
Germans ready to bear any taxation, 

61. 
Germany and Austria, 24. 
Germany and Carlyle, 54- 
Germany and Denmark, 218. 
Germany and England, gain by study 

of each, 55. 
Germany and Napoleon the First, 61. 
Germany and national unity, 60. 
Germany, beer-houses, 76. 
Germany, consolidation of, effected by 

spirit of nationality, 36. 
Germany, English literature in, 78; 
Germany, English want of interest in, 

53- 
Germany, happiness of its people, 85. 
Germany in time of Thirty Years' War, 

59- 

Germany, its spoliation and France, 
60. 

Germany — Politics, by Sidney Whit- 
man, 53. 

Germany protects her poor, 64. 

Germany, Russian ignorance of, 54 



Index. 



403 



Germany, the Reformation in, 58 
Germany, the school of philosophers, 

123. 
Germany, want of practical ability, 76. 
Gessler, 270. 
Gibbons on Armenia, 4. 
Gielgud, Adam, on Poland, 113. 
Gladstone, W. E., 74. 
Gladstone on Belgium, 266. 
Gladstone on Serbs, 345. 
Glasus defeats Austrians, 272. 
Goethe, 77. 
Goethe on Jews, 368. 
Gogol, Nicholas, 107. 
Golitsin, Prince, and emancipation of 

Serfs, 97. 
Gordon, Sir Robert, at Constantinople, 

312. 
Goschen and Egypt, 338, 339. 
Goths, 201. 
Government by bribery in Armenia, 

13- 

Government in Belgium, 256. 
Government in Austria, 29. 
Government in Denmark, 229. 
Government in Greece, 290. 
Government in Iceland, 234. 
Government in Montenegro, 354. 
Government in Servia, 355. 
Government in Spain, 176. 
Government in Sweden, 211. 
Government indifference in Turkey, 13. 
*' Gracious majesty" dropped in 

Norway, 190. 
Graham, Mrs. Cunninghame, on Spain, 

157. 
Grandson, battle of, 273. 
Gratitude of Jews, 372. 
Great Britain and Austria of common 

nationality, 21. 
Great men's initiative, 62. 
Greater Greece and rich Greeks, 293. 
Greece, by J. Theodore Bent, 289. 
Greece, disappointment respecting, 290. 
"Greece has no future," 292. 
Greek art and Egypt, 325. 
Greek Catholics in Austria, 30. 
Greek Church, 293. 
Greek Church and Catholicism, 95. 
Greek Church, Russia head of, 92. 
Greek education, 291, 294. 
Greek municipal liberty, 318. 
Greek nationality and its religion, 293. 
Greek nationality and monasteries, 297. 
Greek oppressors and England, 302. 
Greek population in Turkish Empire, 

293- . 
Greek Railways, 291. 
Greeks during period of freedom, 291. 



Greeks in Armenia, 299. 

Greeks in Asia Minor, 299. 

Greeks of Constantinople, 293. 

Greeks of Egypt, 332. 

Greeks of to-day, 289. 

Greeks, rich, and greater Greece, 293. 

Greeks under Turkey, 315. 

Groome, F. H., on the Gypsies, 379. 

Grundlov of Norway, 185. 

Gustav Wasa, 208. 

Gustavus III., 211. 

Gustavus Adolphus II., 209. 

Gypsies and British lawgivers, 383. 

Gypsies and Gentiles, 381. 

Gypsies and fairy tales, 388. 

Gypsies and music, 381, 388. 

Gypsies and the Crucifixion, 390. 

Gypsies, by F. H. Groome, 379. 

Gypsies, crime imputed to, 384. 

Gypsies excellent company, 388. 

Gypsies' fatherland, 379. 

Gypsies in Asia Minor, 390. 

Gypsies in French Basque country, 383. 

Gypsies in Germany, 383. 

Gypsies in Roumania, 383. 

Gypsies in Scotland, 382. 

Gypsies in Transylvania, 390. 

Gypsies not cowards, 392. 

Gypsies not soldiers or sailors, 391. 

Gypsies protected, 383. 

Gypsies, rich, 381. 

Gypsy and a Snowdon sunrise, 394. 

Gypsy death, a, 394. 

Gypsy fiddlers, 389. 

Gypsy free life, 394. 

Gypsy gifts, 389. 

Gypsy journeys, 388. 

Gypsy kidnapping, 385. 

Gypsy practical knowledge, 394. 

Gypsy smiths, 390. 

Gypsy woman and clergyman, 380. 

HAANDF/ESTNING, 220. 

Habeas Corpus Act in fourteenth 

century, 124. 
Hadrian Emperor and Jews, 372. 
Haigs, the, or Armenians, 2. 
Haman on the Jews, 364. 
Hanging of Gypsies, 381. 
Hanseatic league, 221. 
Hansetowns, 58, 219. 
Hapsburg in Switzerland, 270. 
Harem's baneful influence, 306. 
Hartington, Lord, on English in Egypt, 

340. 
" Harum Pasha," noted gypsy, 385. 
Hatred of foreigners in Servia, 359. 
Hats and caps, 210. 
Heine on the Jews, 363. 



404 



Index. 



Heine on the Poles, 89. 

Heinrich the greatest of the Baben- 

bergers, 22. 
Heligoland, 222. 

Hellenic philological syllogos, 294. 
Henry of Valois and Poland, 126. 
Herberstein on the ancient inhabitants 

of Russia, 88. 
Herculaneum disinterred, 152. 
Hermoupolis in Syra, 292. 
Heroes of Dutch Independence, 249. 
Hildesheim, 82. 
Hindustani and Gypsies, 379. 
Hodgkin , Howard, on Switzerland, 267. 
Holidays in Servia, 359. 
Holland and Queen Elizabeth, 243. 
Holstein and Denmark, 222. 
Holy of Holies, 363. 
Holy Roman Empire, union with 

Bohemia and Hungary, 40. 
Home Rule granted to Croatia, 48. 
Home Rule on Schleswick Holstein, 

224. 
Hospitality of Jews, 365. 
House, to bivouac in, 166. 
Houses of Parliament in Austria, 29. 
Hungarian attention to politics, 50. 
Hungarian civil war, 46. 
Hungarian class privilege abolition, 45. 
Hungarian discordant element united, 

35-. 
Hungarian education, 30, 50. 

Hungarian language supplanted, 43. 

Hungarian Liberalism, 51. 

Hungarian maintenance of a national 

policy, 34. 

Hungarian ministers made responsible, 

45- 
Hungarian national spirit awakened, 

43-. 
Hungarian parliament again convoked, 

47-. 

Hungarian railways, 50. 

Hungarian taxes, 5°- 

Hungary an agricultural country, 49. 

Hungary and Austria, 24, 42. 

Hungary and Austria, misunderstand- 
ings between Governments, 46. 

Hungary and Bohemia, union of, 40. 

Hungary and England, analogy be- 
tween, 33, 39. 

Hungary and Russia, 46. 

Hungary as the England of the east, 33. 

Hungary, beginning of constitutional 
government, 39. 

Hungary, by Professor Aiigustus 
Pttlszky, 33. 

Hungary, compulsory military service 
in, 50. 



Hungary, deprived of commerce, 

becomes torpid, 43. 
Hungary has only a peace policy, 51. 
Hungary, Joseph II. refuses to be 

crowned the king of, 43. 
Hungary, Magyar dominant element 

in, 37- 
Hungary, Magyars enter, a thousand 

years ago, 38. 
Hungary, many religions in, 37. 
Hungary, national interest keynote of 

its life and thought, 35. 
Hungary prostrate in 1849, 47. 
Hungary, striking effect of spirit of 

nationality, 36. 
Hungary the bulwark of civilised Chris- 
tendom, 33. 
Hungary, the Reformation in, 41. 
Hungary, Transylvania reincorporated, 

45- 
Hungary, Turkish conquest of, 40. 
Hungary under rule of the elective 

kings," 39. 
Hungary, varied people in, 37. 
Hungary's days of hopeless darkness, 41. 
Hungary's freehold peasantry, 49. 
Hungary's national music ascribed to 

Gypsies, 388. 
Hypatia, 334. 

Ibrahim Pasha defeats the Turks, 

337- 

Ibsen Henrik, 199. 

Iceland, 233. 

Iceland (with Denmark), by Eirikr 
Magnusson, 217. 

Icelandic constitution, 234. 

Ignorance of foreign countries, 53. 

Immigrants of Jewish race, 375. 

Indebtedness to Gypsies, 389. 

India and Egypt, architectural resem- 
blance, 326. 

Industrial evolution in Spain, 176. 

Inhabitants of Turkey, 306. 

Inquisition in Holland, 242. 

Inquisition in Spain, 169. 

Inquisition in the Netherlands, 254. 

Inquisition, the Holy, 145. 

Institutions of Western countries 
adopted by Magyars, 38. 

Intensive voice, the, 369. 

Ireland and Poland, 129. 

Irish and battle of Athenry, 241. 

Irishmen in prominent positions in 
Austria, 27. 

Irredentists, 154. 

Ishmael Pasha, 324, 337. 

Ishmael Pasha first Khedive, 338. 

Islam testified to, 339. 



Index. 



405 



Israel and Egypt, 330 

Israel exiled, 365. 

Israel, Red Sea's passage, 330. 

Italia Irredentists, 144. 

Italian agriculture, 137, 148, 153- 

Italian architecture, 136. 

Italian armaments, 147. 

Italian canals, 136. 

Italian climate, 137. 

Italian conscription, 152. 

Italian decline, 141. 

Italian dissension, 115. 

Italian finance, 147. 

Italian liberty, 135. 

Italian libraries, 135. 

Italian lotteries, 147. 

Italian municipal institution, 136. 

Italian national debt, 147. 

Italian navigators, 135. 

Italian parties, 154. 

Italian politics, 154. 

Italian railways, 151. 

Italian republics, 140. 

Italian roads, 136. 

Italian soil classic, 135. 

Italian successes, 1 50. 

Italian taxation, 148. _ _ 

Italian unification of, effected by spirit 
of nationality, 36. 

Italian unity and the Pope, 143. 

Italian unity, difficulties of, 142. 

Italian universities, 135. 

Italians a versatile people, 152. 

Italians, the, 141. 

Italy and Africa, 149. 

Italy and Austria, 142-144= 

Italy and civilisation, 135. 

Italy and domestic tyranny, 141. 

Italy and France, 142-150. 

Italy and her neighbours, 148. 

Italy and the empire of the sea, 140. 

Italy and the Italians, 146. 

Italy the nursery of the arts, 123. 

Italy and the workshops of the world, 
140. 

Italy, area, 136. 

Italy, by J. Stephen Jeans, 135. 

Italy chief battle-field of Europe, 139- 

Italy, condition of people, 153. 

Italy for the Italians, 143. 

Italy of modern times, 152. 

Italy, population, 136. 

Italy nursery of arts and sciences, 151. 

Ivan III., 95- 

Ivan IV., 95. 

Ivo the Black, 345- 

James, Richard, and Russian Mini, 



Janisaries, meaning of term, 304. 

Jeans, J Stephen, on Italy, 135. 

Jesuits in Austria, 23. 

Jesuits in Switzerland, 285. 

Jew and Gentile, 366. 

Jewish camp, two parties in, 376. 

Jewish holy of holies, 363. 

Jewish immigrants, 375. 

Jewish Naturalisation Bill, 1753, 3 6 7- 

Jewish population of Palestine, 376. 

Jewish ultimate independence, 376. 

Jews and education in German, 373. 

Jews and French Revolution, 367. 

Jews and politics in England, 375. 

Jews and the Emperor Hadrian, 372. 

Jews and union of larger world, 366. 

Jews, Archbishop Nicanor on the, 371. 

Jews as Christians in Russia, 371.' 

Jews charged with exclusiveness, 371. 

Jews, hospitable, 365. 

Jews, ignorance respecting, 363. 

Jews in Babylon, 365. 

Jews in England, 374. 

Jews in Germany, 372. 

Jews in German army, 373. 

Jews in Holland , 244. 

Jews in Poland, 126. 

Jews in their Relation to other Races, by 

Rev. S. Singer, 363. 
Jews, law-abiding, 366. 
Jews of Russia, 369. 
Jews, short way with, 364. 
Jews, the traders in Russia, 91. 
Jews' thirst for knowledge, 370. 
Jews "too clever," 373. 
Jews, union among, 365. 
John Bull in Spain, 161. 
Johun, Karl, and wealthy peasant, 195. 
Joseph, Emperor, and Liberal ideas, 

28. 
Joseph II. refuses to be crowned king 

of Hungary, 43. 
Joseph II. of Austria, 255. 
Joseph the Hebrew in Egypt, 329. 
Journeying of Gypsies, 388. 
Joyeuse Entree, charter of, 252. 

Kahal, the, 91. 

Kalmar union, treaty of, 208. 

Karl Johun, 184. 

Kara George deserts his country, 348. 

Kara George drives the Turk from 

Servia, 347. 
Kara George kills his father, 347. 
Kara George murdered, 349. 
Kara Georgevitch condemned, 351. 
Keil, Treaty of, 184, 211. 
King or Pope, 245. 
Knout, the, 94. 



406 



Index. 



Koltsov, Alexis, 102. 

Kommune Bertyrelsi, 191. 

Komodromoi, 390. 

"Kongeloo," or king's law, 221. 

Koosovo, battle of, 343. 

Koran, the, 308. 

Kosciuszko, 121. * 

Kosciuszko and Finis Polonia, 128. 

Kossuth, Louis, 44. 

Kresbrane, the, 96. 

Krighanich and Panslavism, no. 

Kropotkin, Prince, on Baltic Provinces, 

90. 
Kurds and Circassians in Armenia, 16. 
Kurds in Armenia, 9. 
Kurds, the, C. Wilkinson on, 10. 
Kuttab schools, 308. 

Labour in Servia, 358. 

Ladies as professors in Italy, 151. 

Lagthing, the, 187. 

Laing, Samuel, on Norwegian peasants, 

196. 
Lamartine on Armenians, 4. 
Lamonosov, 101. 
Landenberg, 270. 

Landesgemeinde of Uri and Stans, 278. 
Land's Bunk in Iceland, 235. 
Landsting, 212, 230. 
Landtage in Austria, 29. 
Last war of religion, 243. 
Law-abiding Jews, 366. 
Law and Italy, 135. 
Lazarus, Emma, on Jews, 369. 
Leasehold system incomprehensible, 

194. 
Lecky on partition of Poland, 116. 
Leibeigenschaft, 119. 
Leo VI. of Armenia, 3. 
Leopold of Austria, 271. 
Leopold I. of Belgium, 256, 259, 265. 
Leopold I. of Belgium, 265. 
Leroy-Beaulieu on Russia, 90. 
Leroy-Beaulieu, 97-99. 
Lewes, G. H., and Germany, 54- 
Liberal ideas and Emperor Joseph, 28. 
Liberalism in Hungary, 57. 
" Liberty," 62. 
Liberty and Poland, 1 16. 
Libraries in Italy, 135. 
Liege, Commune of, 252. 
Liege, Prince-Bishops of, 255. 
Lighthouses in Denmark, 229. 
Lincoln, Abraham. 75. 
Literature in Armenia, 5. 
Literature in Norway, 198. 
Literature in Poland, 129. 
Literature in Russia, 99. 
Literature in Spain, 172-176. 



Lituvinova, Barbara, mother of 

Turgueniev, 107. 
Local government in Norway, 191. 
Local government in Servia, 357. 
Lombards, 141. 
Lombardy, 144. 
London misery, 6"J. 
London music halls, 25. 
London newspapers on Austria, 19. 
Lorraine, 57. 
Lotteries in Italy, 147. 
Lubbock, Sir John, and metal working, 

389-. . 
Lucerne joins confederates, 271. 
Luther and Wycliff, 245. 
Luther, Martin, 58. 
Lutheran reform, 245. 
Luxemburg Railway, 260. 

Macaulay on the patron of poets, 101. 
M'Coan,J. C, on Egypt, 323. 
Macedonia, 298. 
MacGregor's, " The Ottoman Empire," 

319- 
M'Pherson, James, noted Gypsy, 382. 
Magnusson, Eirikr, on Denmark and 

Iceland, 217. 
Magnusson, Eirikr, on Sweden, 201. 
Magyars enter Hungary a thousand 

years ago, 38. 
Magyars in Hungary, 37. 
Magyars recognise no aristocracy of 

race, 39. 
Magyar, the dominant element in 

Hungary, 37. 
Mahometan, fraternal spirit, 314. 
Maintenance of sole market, 247. 
Mamelukes rule Egypt, 335. 
Manchester school, the, 80. 
Manetho, 327. 

Mankind's debt to Poland, 128. 
Man's country his dwelling-place, 369. 
Manufactures in Austria, 30. 
Manufactures in Denmark, 228. 
Manufactures in Poland, 129. 
Manufactures of Sweden, 214. 
Maragatos, the, 178. 
Marathon, its associations, 237. 
Margaret, the Semiramis of the North, 

219. 
Mashers, sign of national deterioration, 

193- 

Massacre at Stockholm, 208-220. 
Maximilian, Emperor of Germany, 253. 
May, Sir T. Erskine, on absolute veto, 

189. 
Mayors and Kmets in Servia, 357. 
Medical schools in Vienna, 31. 
Mehemet AH, 336. 



Index. 



407 



Mehemet Tewfik, 338. 
Melbourne's, Lord, advice, 249. 
Members of diet in Sweden, 212. 
Members of Parliament in Norway, 

190. 
Members of Parliament in Servia, 356. 
Memphis, 327. 

Metternich driven from power, 28. 
Metternich, Prince, 25. 
Michel, Prince of Servia, murdered, 

357- 

Michelet on Commune of Liege, 252. 

Middle Ages in Italy, 140. 

Middle class in Spain, 176. 

Milan's divorce and abdication, 354. 

Military service in Armenia, 13. 

Military service in Russia for Jews, 370. 

Militaryism in Germany, 65. 

Milosch abdicates, 350. 

Milosch an autocrat, 349. 

Milosch dies, 351. 

Milosch founds peasant proprietors, 

349- 

Milosch Obrenovitch, founder of Royal 

House of Servia, 348. 
Milosch proclaimed Prince of Servia, 

349- 
Milosch's clemency, 349. 
Minchin, J. G. Cotton, on Servia and 

Montenegro, 343. 
Mining in Sweden, 214. 
Ministerial responsibility introduced in 

Hungary, 45. 
Minorities, lesson from, 248. 
Minority representation, 263. 
Mir, its universality, 97. 
Misery in London, 67. 
Mithodius, the Apostle of the Slavs, 

344- 
Modern Greek language, 289. 
Modern influence in Spain, 158. 
Modern progress in Spain, 163. 
Modern traveller in Spain, 158. 
Mohacs, batile of, 34. 
Mohammedan religion in Turkey, 308. 
Molokani, the, 99. 

Monasteries and Greek nationality, 297. 
Mongol invasion of Russia, 94. 
Mongol rule in Russia, 94. 
Mongols in Russia, 91. 
Montenegrin government, 354. 
Montenegro a sanctuary for the Serbs, 

345- 
Montenegro, 1516 to 1851, 346. 
Montenegro's soil consecrated, 345. 
Monuments of art, 179. 
Moor society in Denmark, 228. 
Moorish habits in Spain, 166. 
Morat, battle of, 273. 



Morfill, W. R., on Russia, 87. 

Morgarten, battle of, 271. 

Moscow the germ of Russian empire, 

94- 
Moussa Bey, 10. 
Moussa Bey's trial, 11. 
Municipal liberty in Greece, 318. 
Municipalities and Italy, 136. 
Murder of Prince Michel, 351. 
Murder unknown among gypsies, 386. 
Music and the Viennese, 31. 
Musicians and Vienna, 31. 
Mysteries about jews, 363. 

Nancy, battle of, 273. 

Naples and Italy, 143. 

Napoleon in Egypt, 336. 

Napoleon the First and Germany, 61. 

Napoleon III. and Luxemburg Railway, 

260. 
Napoleon III. ignorant of Germany, 

54 ' .0 

National Assembly in Norway in 1821, 

186. 
National characteristics accentuated by 

Jews, 369. 
National characteristics, maintenance 

of, 193. 
National Council in Switzerland, 275- 
National interest the keynote of the 

life and thought in Hungary, 35. 
National policy, the maintenance of, in 

England and Hungary, 34. 
National spirit awakened in Hungary, 

.43- . 

Nationality, its definition, 240. 

Nationality, spirit of, effects consolida- 
tion of Germany and unification of 
Italy, 36. 

Nationality, spirit of, produces striking 
effect in Hungary, 36. 

Native education in Turkey, 308. 

Naval heroes of Denmark, 221. 

Naval warfare, rise of, 217. 

Navarino, 31 1. 

Navigation Acts, 248. 

Nestir monk of Kiev, 92. 

Nestor, the earliest Russian historian, 
203. 

New Ezekiel, 378. 

Nicanor, Archbishop, on Jews, 371. 

Nicholas de Flue, 273. 

Nicholas, Emperor, and peasant pro- 
prietors, 120. 

Nikon, a Russian primate, 98. 

Nile, the, 324. 

Nilotic historical evidence, 326. 

" No bishop, no king," 243. 

Nobility abolished in Norway, 186. 



408 



Index. 



Nobles in Poland, 117. 

Noefels, battle of, 272. 

Norman, C. B., on Moussa Bey, 10. 

Norse modern invasion of England, 200. 

Norsemen, 181. 

Norsemen and English, 181. 

Norway abolishes nobility, 186. 

Norway and Danish official's insolence, 
184. 

Norway and foreign affairs, 191. 

Norway and Sweden, 205. 

Norway and Sweden and Paris Exhi- 
bition, 192. 

Norway and Sweden, union of, 191. 

Norway, by H. L. Brmkstad, 18 1. 

Norway ceded to Sweden. 185, 211. 

Norway demands full equality with 
Sweden, 192. 

Norway, king's position in, 190. 

Norway pays its Members of Parlia- 
ment, 190. 

Norway, "supply in," 190. 

Norway, suspensive veto in, 185. 

Norway, three epochs in, 183. 

Norway torn from Denmark, 222. 

Norway, tourist in, 198. 

Norway, union with Denmark, 183. 

Norwegian education, 196. 

Norwegian fisheries, 196. 

Norwegian forest industry, 197. 

Norwegian franchise, 190. 

Norwegian impeachment of the min- 
istry, 189. 

Norwegian literature, 198. 

Norwegian local government, 191. 

Norwegian peasants, 194, 195. 

Norwegians discover America, 183. 

Nothomb, J. B., 257, 259, 261. 

Novgorod, 92. 

Novikoff, Madame de, 116, 117. 

Nysad, treaty of, 210 

Oases, the five, 324. 
Oasis of Amnion, 324. 
Obrenovitch, fall of house of, 350. 
Odelsthmg, the, 187. 
Officials in Germany, 64. 
Olaf Skeetking, 204. 
Oldenburg dynasty, 220. 
Oldenburgers, death of thelastofthe,225. 
Oppression of peasantry in Poland, 119. 
Orange and Hanover, Houses of, 248. 
Orange and Stuarts, House of, 247. 
Orban Frere, 259. 
Oriental characteristics, 310. 
Oscar II., and the veto in Norway, 188. 
Osiris, the great god's burial place, 325. 
Othman, founder of Ottoman Empire, 
3°4- 



Otho, king of Greece, 290. 
Ottoman conquest of Egypt, 335. 
Ottoman Empire by MacGregor, 319. 
Ottomon Empire, by H. Anthony 

Salmone, 303. 
Ottoman Empire founded, 304. 
Ottoman Empire's dissolution, 311. 

Pacta conventa of Poles with their 

kings, 126. 
Palestine for the Jews, 377. 
Palestine still land of promise for Jews 

376. 
Palestine's associations, 237. 
Palmerston, Lord, 69. 
Panslavism, no. 
Papacy and civilisation, 145. 
Papacy, the, 144. 
Papal authority and Spain, 168. 
Paris Exhibition and Norway, 192. 
Parish's diplomatic history of Greece, 

Parliament in Galicia, 132. 
Parliamentary government in Denmark, 

231. 
Parliamentary institutions in Austria, 29. 
Parliamentary power restricted in 

Austria, 29. 
Pasha, origin of, 304. 
Paternal government in Germany, 84. 
Patriarchial state of Servia, 356. 
Patriot and the cosmopolitan, 36. 
Patriotism, 63. 
Peace of Adrianople, 312. 
Peace of Westphalia, 60. 
Peace, the whole Hungarian nation in 

favour of, 51. 
Peasant made tenant in Poland, 120. 
Peasant party in Norway, 188. 
Peasantry in Norway, eminent men 

from, 195. 
Peasantry in Spain, 170. 
Peasants and king in Norway, 195. 
Peasants in Poland, 119. 
Pelago, Menendezy, 174. 
Penn, William, on government, 282. 
People, varied, in Hungary, 37. 
Pereda, 172. 
Persia and Egypt, 331. 
Peter the Great, 93, 95. 
Peter the Great creates a navy and art 

army, 95. 
Peter the Great's will, in. 
Peter I. of Montenegro, 352. 
Philip II., saint or devil, 169. 
Philip II. of Spain, 241, 254. 
Philip, II. of Spain and Poland, 127. 
Philce the sacred Island, 325. 
Poland and freedom, 126. 



Index. 



409 



Poland and her detractors, 116. 
Poland and Ireland, 129. 
Poland and oppression of peasants, 119. 
Poland and Philip II., 127. 
Poland and Russia, 95. 
Poland and Russian tyranny, 129. 
Poland and the Jews, 126. 
Poland, by Adam Gielgud, 113. 
Poland dismemberment, 89. 
Poland, ignorance respecting, 113. 
Poland in 1807, 127. 
Poland, internal dissension in, 114. 
Poland, land of liberty, 116. 
Poland non-aggressive, 123. 
Poland, spoliation of, 113. 
Poland still alive, 128. 
Poland the land of liberty, 123. 
Poland, treatment of, by Austria, 89. 
Poland, treatment of, by Prussia, 89. 
Poland, treatment of, by Russia, 89. 
Poland, vanguard of European civilisa- 
tion, 123. 
Poland's chief articles of exchange, 129. 
Poland's future, 133. 
Poland's manufactures, 129. 
Poland's present state, 128. 
Poland's tribute to Europe, 123. 
Poland's want of middle class, 91. 
Polenta, 153. 

Poles and literary culture, 123. 
Poles and their kings, 126. 
Poles as "the French of the North," 

33- 
Poles capable of self-government, 122. 
Poles educated in England, 128. 
Poles in Galicia, 132. 
Poles in German Poland, 131. 
Poles in Russia, 89. 
Poles opposed to monopolies, 127. 
Polish assimilation, 131. 
Polish, first, Parliament, 124. 
Polish free institutions, 118. 
Polish language, teaching of, 130. 
Polish nationality in Prussia, 122. 
Polish nobles, 118. 
Polish painters, 129. 
Polish peasants, 119. 
Polish peasants in Austria, 120. 
Polish peasants in Parliament, 121. 
Polish peasants in Prussia, 120. 
Polish peasants in Russia, 120. 
Polish political capacity, 132. 
Polish rising, 1794, leaders of, 121. 
Polish risings, 121. 
Polish singers, 129. 

Polish tax-collectors and England, 127. 
Polish writers, 129. 
Political backwardness of Austria, 23, 
Political capacity of the Poles, 132. 



Political economists and Spain, 171. 
Political economy in Italy, 152. 
Political life not the main interest of a 

nation, 19. 
Political parties in Belgium, 258. 
Political parties in Servia, 360. 
Politics, 56. 
Politics absorb much public attention 

in Hungary, 50. 
Politics and Jews in England, 375. 
Politics tabooed in Austria, 28. 
Politski, Simeon, 101. 
Poor non-existing in Servia, 361. 
Poor protected in Germany, 64. 
Pope misguided to Pope informed, 169. 
Pope or king, 245. 
Popham, Chief Justice, and Gypsies, 

384. 
Popular education adopted in England, 

8 7-. 

Population of Austria, 27. 

Population of Greece, 293. 
Population of Italy, 136. 
Population of Jews in Palestine, 376. 
Population of Russia, 87. 
Population of Sweden, 213. 
Population of Switzerland, 267. 
Present state of Poland, 128. 
Press gagged in Armenia, 13. 
Press law, the new, in Servia, 358. 
Press, the, introduced into Russia, 95. 
Progressists in Servia, 361. 
Protective system in Sweden, 213. 
Protestant Scando- Baltic empire, 209. 
Protestantism in Belgium, 259. 
Protestantism in Low Countries, 254. 
Protestants in Poland, 126. 
Provincial and commercial laws in 

Belgium, 258. 
Prussian government and Poland, 131. 
Public Meetings in Poland, 124. 
Public prosecutor in Turkey, 12. 
Public spirit among Jews in England, 

375- 

Pulszky, Professor Augustus, on Hun- 
gry, 33- 

Pushkin, Alexander, 101. 

Pyramids, the great, 327. 

Quarterly Review on Poland, 117. 

Races in Russia, 88, 92. 
Radicals in Servia, 361. 
Railways in Denmark, 229. 
Railways in Greece, 291. 
Railways in Hungary, 50. 
Railways in Italy, 151. 
Railways in Sweden, 214. 
Ralston and Russian Skazki, 100. 



4io 



Index. 



Rameses II., 327. 

Rape of Armenian girls, 8. 

Raskol, the, in the Russian Church, 98. 

Reaction in Austria in 1852, 28. 

Referendum, 283. 

Referendum in cantons, 284. 

Reformation in Denmark, 220. 

Reformation in Germany, 58. 

Reformation in Hungary, 41. 

Regency in Servia, 352. 

Religion common to Goths and Swedes, 

201. 
Religion in Russia, by Leroy-Beaulieu, 

98. 
Religion, last war of, 243. 
Religion of Egypt, 331. 
Religion of the Austrians, 29. 
Religions in Hungary, 37. 
Religious equality in Switzerland, 285. 
Religious freedom in Poland, 126. 
Religious tolerance by Jews, 366. 
Religious tolerance in Turkey, 315. 
Religious unity in Spain, 169. 
Representation of minorities, 263. 
Representatives, House of, in Belgium, 

257. 
Republic of United Provinces, 254. 
Restoration of Palestine to Jews, 377. 
Revolution at Brussels, 1830, 256. 
Rigsdag, the, 211, 230. 
Rigsret, the, 189. 

Risings in Poland, peasants at, 120. 
Roads in Italy, 136. 
Rogers, Prof . J. E. Thorold, on Dutch 

Republic, 237. 
Romani language and Gypsies, 380. 
Rome and Egypt, 333. 
Rome and Flanders, 239. 
Rome and modern Italy, 140. 
Rossetta Stone, 334. 
Roth, Ling, agriculture and peasantry 

in Eastern Russia, 98. 
Roumaniaand the Russian armies, 314. 
Roumanian Gypsies, 383. 
Roumelia, Eastern, created, 314. 
Roumenes in Hungary, 37. 
Rudolf of Hapsburg, 270. 
Ruler of a nation, the, 139. 
Rus, the, 203. 
Russia and Armenia, 6. 
Russia and Austria, 30. 
Russia and Denmark, 222. 
Russia and Finland, 88. 
Russia and Milosch, 349. 
Russia and Montenegro and Servia, 

314- 
Russia and Poland, 95. 
Russia and Sweden, 184. 
Russia and the Mongols, 123. 



Russia and Turkey, 305. 

Russia, area and population, 87. 

Russia as a sluggish mass, 95. 

Russia, Asiatic, made European, 96. 

Russia before Mongol invasion, 93. 

Russia, by W. R. Morfill, 87. 

Russia intervenes against Hungary, 46. 

Russia introduced to the Danube, 311. 

Russia invades Sweden, 210. 

Russia, press introduced, 95. 

Russia, races in, 92. 

Russia supported by England, 318. 

Russia, the Jews in, 90. 

Russian armies and Roumania, 314. 

Russian army and navy created, 95. 

Russian chronicles, 100. 

Russian difficulties in forming a parlia- 
ment, 92. 

Russian grammar, printed at Oxford,. 
96. 

Russian historian, Nestor, 203. 

Russian ignorance of Germany, 54. 

Russian Jews, 369. 

Russian language, 87. 

Russian literature, 99. 

Russian occupation of Armenia, result 
of, 16. 

Russian peasants tolerant, 91. 

Russian people, 125. 

Russian Poland, 130. 

Russian press, 1 10. 

Russian reviews, no. 

Russian State founded by Swedes, 203.. 

Russian towns, 91. 

Russian tyranny, 129. 

Russians and Poles, feud between, 89. 

Russians defeated by Polish peasants, 
121. 

Russians, trace of, in Herodotus, 92. 

Russia's physical geography, 91. 

Riitli, meeting of, 270. 

Sacred Sheep, tradition of, 308. 

Said Pasha, 337. 

St. George's Day in Russia, 96. 

Saladin, 335. 

Salisbury, Lord, and Egypt, 340. 

Salmone, H. Anthony — The Ottoman 

Empire, 303. 
Salvation army in Switzerland, 285. 
Samaun, Yuri, 90. 
Samos and ruined Chios, 301. 
San Stefano Treaty and Armenia, 6. 
Saracenic literature and art in Egypt, 

335- 
Sarbievius, 123. 
" Saudades," 157. 
Savoy dynasty, 155. 
Scand countries, union of, 193. 



Index. 



411 



Scandinavia, union of, 219. 

Scandinavian dialects, 215. 

Scandinavian history, dawn of, 217. 

Scandinavian Vikings, end of, 204.. 

Scando-Baltic empire, 209. 

Schaffhausen joins Confederation, 273. 

Schidrotvilz, Dr. S., on Austria, 19. 

Schiller on Viennese, 20. 

Schiller's " William Tell," 271. 

Schleswick Holstein, Denmark's los- 
ing of, 223. 

Schleswick Holstein, the loss of, a gain 
to Denmark, 226. 

Schools, public, in Germany, 83. 

Schwytz, 267, 270. 

Science in Italy, 151. 

Scotch adventurers in Russia, 95. 

Scotch and Battle of Bannockburn, 
241. 

Scott, Sir Walter, in Germany, 78. 

Scott's, Sir Walter, influence on Russian 
Literature, 107. 

Selim first Khaliph, 305. 

Semiramis of the North, 219. 

Semitic Race, the, in Russia, 90. 

Sempach, Battle of, 272, 279, 286. 

Senate in Belgium, 257. 

Separate states of Switzerland, 268. 

Serb Czar, the last, 343. 

Serb, the, 343. 

Serbs converted to Christianity, 344. 

Serbs retain their nationality through 
their monasteries, 344. 

Serbs, the early, 343. 

Serfdom abolished in Belgium, 253. 

Servia and Montenegro, t-y J. G. Cotton 
Minchin, 343. 

Servia and Russia, 349. 

Servia, no poor, 361. 

Servian education, 360. 

Servian government, 355. 

Servian hatred of foreigners, 359. 

Servian labour, 358. 

Servian local government, 357. 

Servian Mayors and Kmets, 357. 

Servian Members of Parliament, 356. 

Servian national debt, 359. 

Servian new press law, 358. 

Servian political parties, 360. 

Servian regents, 360. 

Servian trade guilds, 360. 

Servia's autonomy proclaimed, 349. 

Sevasly, M., on Armenia, 1. 

Sevastopol built, 96. 

Seven Years' War, 247. 

Shakespeare in Germany, 78. 

Shevchenko, Taras, 104. 

Short way with Jews, 364. 

Sigurdsson, Jon, 234. 



Sincerity of Mohammedans, 308. 
Singer, Rev. S., on The Jews in their 

Relation to other Races, 363. 
Skupshtina, the, 355. 
Slav an agriculturist, 91. 
Slavery in Turkey, 8. 
Slavs, 88, 92. 
Slavs, Eastern, 111. 
Slavs, Western, 111. 
Smek, author of code of law, 208. 
Smith, Adam, and Gypsies, 384. 
Smith, Adam, on Navigation Act, 248. 
Smith, Bosworth, on the Arabs, 309. 
Smith's craft and Gypsies, 390. 
Sobieski, 123. 

Sobieski addressed by a deputy, 125. 
Social war, the, 68. 
Soil of Italy classic, 135. 
Soldier in Spain, 176. 
Soldier plague in Spain, 177. 
Sole market, maintenance of, 247. 
" Solyman the Magnificent," 22. 
Sonderbund, the, 275. 
Spain and her colonies, 179. 
Spain and modern improvements, 168. 
Spain and Papal authority, 168. 
Spain and modern influences, 158. 
Spain and modern progress, 163. 
Spain and the modern traveller, 158. 
Spain as Paradise, 157. 
Spain as she is, 162. 
Spain, by Mrs. Cztnninghame Graham, 

157. 

Spain in the fifteenth century, 175. 

Spain of French opera, 162. 

Spain, what she might have been, 179. 

Spaniards and time of Philip II., 168. 

Spaniards at home, 165. 

Spaniards of the provinces, 165. 

Spanish aesthetic influence, 170. 

Spanish antique agriculture, 167. 

Spanish beggar, 160. 

Spanish country inns, 164. 

Spanish cuisine, 166. 

Spanish democracy, 170. 

Spanish emigration, 177. 

Spanish freethinker, 169. 

Spanish Government, 176. 

Spanish industrial evolution, 176. 

Spanish infantry, 242. 

Spanish Inquisition, 169. 

Spanish middle class, 176. 

Spanish modern literature, 172. 

Spanish monasteries suppressed, 178. 

Spanish nation, its entirety, 168. 

Spanish peasantry, 170. 

Spanish poets and dramatists, 176. 

Spanish prison, 160. 

Spanish quaint towns, 167. 



412 



Index. 



Spanish religious unity, 169. 

Spanish town described, 160. 

Spanish traveller, 163. 

Spanish travelling, 163. 

Spanish want of receptivity, 168. 

Spanish watchmen, 161. 

Spanish women, 166. 

Sphinx, the, 328. 

Stans Convention, 273. 

Starobriadtsi, the, 98. 

Stead's god-like Englishman, 179. 

Stephen Dushan, Emperor of the Serbs, 

344- 

Stephen, King, apostle-saint of Hun- 
gary, 38. 

Stephen's Kirche, the noblest church in 
Europe, 22. 

Stileman, Mr., on Greece under Tur- 
kish rule, 316. 

Stockholm, massacre at, 1520, 208, 220. 

Stoffel, Baron, 54. 

Storthing, the, 187. 

Stuart, Lord Dudley, and Poland, 113. 

Stundish, the, 99. 

Subject races, nature of, 88. 

Suez Canal, 337, 338. 

Suffolk, Duchess of, in Poland, 127. 

Sulaiman, 305. 

Sultan and liberty of trade, 318. 

Sunday afternoon in Vienna, 26. 

Sunday in Germany, 82. 

Sunday schools, drawing taught in, 229. 

Supply in Norway, 190. 

Suppression of monasteries in Spain, 
178. 

Svendsen, 196. 

Sverdrup, John, 189. 

Sweating in Servia, 359. 

Sweden acquires Norway, 211. 

Sweden and Norway, 205. 

Sweden and Norway, union of, 191. 

Sweden and Russia, 184. 

Sweden, by Eirikr Magnusson, 201. 

Sweden invaded by Russia, 210. 

Sweden loses Finland, 211. 

Sweden, Norway ceded to, 185. 

Sweden slowly Christianised, 202. 

Sweden's apogee, 210. 

Sweden's exports and imports, 214. 

Sweden's first inhabitants, 201. 

Sweden's internal disunion, 207. 

Swedes, 201. 

Swedes found Russian state, 203. 

Swedish constitution, 211. 

Swedish diet, 212. 

Swedish educator, 214. 

Swedish franchise, 212. 

Swedish free trade, 214. 

Swedish freedom, 204. 



Swedish manufactures, 214. 

Swedish mines, 214. 

Swedish monarchy, 21 1. 

Swedish population, 213. 

Swedish railways, 214. 

Swedish salient characteristics, 215. 

Swedish universities, 215. 

Swiss area, 267. 

Swiss at Grandson, 273. 

Swiss cantons, 268. 

Swiss cantons, diversity of government 

in, 277. 
Swiss civil war, 272. 
Swiss communes, 285. 
Swiss constitution, 268. 
Swiss constitutions, summary of, 276. 
Swiss Council of States, 276. 
Swiss differences in religion, race, etc., 

281. 
Swiss education, 286. 
Swiss emigration, 286. 
Swiss Federal Council, 282. 
Swiss Federal Pact, 274. 
Swiss history retrospect, 270. 
Swiss National Council, 275. 
Swiss nationality, 241. 
Swiss population, 267. 
Swiss Referendum, 283. 
Swiss separate states, 268. 
Swiss take Aargau, 272. 
Swiss tourist, 267. 
Switzerland and Austrian land-steward, 

271. 
Switzerland and French Revolution, 

274. 
Switzerland, by Howard Hodgkin, 267. 
Switzerland in thirteenth century, 270. 
Switzerland, religious equality in, 285. 
Switzerland's beginning, 270. 
Switzerland's early history, 267. 
Szechenyi, Count, urges reforms in 

Hungary, 44. 

Tatar element in the Russian, 94. 
Tax on Christians in Armenia, 14. 
Telos and semi-barbarous Greeks, 297. 
Theodorovitch, Peter, 358. 
Thirty Years' War, 23, 58. 
Thorgny and King of Sweden, 205. 
" Thousand miles up the Nile," 329. 
Thrace, education in, 298. 
Tigranes, reign of, 2. 
Tithes collection in Armenia, 14. 
Tolerance of Russian peasant, 91. 
Tolstoi, Count Leo, 109. 
Trade between England and Poland, 

127. 
Trade guilds in Servia, 360. 
Trade liberty and the Sultan, 318. 



Index. 



413 



Trade of ancient Egypt, 333. 

Trade of Belgium, 253. 

Trade of Denmark, 229. 

Trade of Servia, 358. 

Trade of Sweden, 214. 

Tradition of the sacred sheep, 308. 

Transylvania reincorporated into Hun- 
gary, 45- 

Transylvania, union of eastern counties 
of Hungary, 41. 

Travelling in Spain, 163. 

Treaty of Bucharest, 311. 

Treaty of Kalmar, 208. 

Treaty of Keil, 184-211. 

Treaty of Nystad, 210. 

Trepoff, General, 125. 

Trial of Moussa Bey, II. 

Tricoupis, Mr., 290, 291. 

Trieste and Southern Tyrol and Italy, 
144. 

Turco-Tatar races in Russia, 88. 

Turgenieff on German culture, 75. 

Turgueniev, Ivan, 106, 107. 

Turgueniev's, Madame, doctor, 108. 

Turk an alien population, 307. 

Turkey a naval power, 305. 

Turkey and Armenia, 6. 

Turkey and British merchants, 320. 

Turkey and Catherine, 311. 

Turkey and England, 301, 309. 

Turkey and European civilisation, 304. 

Turkey and Greece, 315. 

Turkey and Russia, 305. 

Turkey and the Black Sea, 313. 

Turkey, apogee, 305. 

Turkey, Europeans in, 307. 

Turkey, Greeks in, 293. 

Turkey, Hungary resists the attacks of, 
33. 

Turkey's apathy for trade, 306. 

Turkey's backward state, 303. 

Turkey's candid friend, 311. 

Turkey's decline, and cause of, 305. 

Turkey's idle words, 7. 

Turkey's lack of national spirit, 303. 

Turkey's lack of unity, 303. 

Turkey's loss of arts, etc. , 306. 

Turkey's modern progress, 303. 

Turkey's public prosecutor, 12. 

Turkey's religious tolerance, 315- 

Turkey's schools, 307. 

Turkey's two populations, 306. 

Turkish blight, 336. 

Turkish conquest of Hungary, 40. 

Turkish government and Chios, 301. 

Turkish soldiers, 315. 

Turkish trade with England, 319. 

Turkish vitality, 314. 



Turks industrious, 303. 

Turner's modern novelist of Russia, 1 10. 

Tuscany's inhabitants, 

Tyranny of Russia, 129. 

Udal laws of Norway, 194. 

Ukraine, burial place of Shevchenko, 

106. 
Ultimate independence of Jews, 376. 
Unification and regeneration of Italy, 

141. 
Unification of Italy, heroes of, 146. 
Uniformity, 243. 
Union among Jews, 365. 
United provinces, republic of, 254. 
Unity of God, 366. 
Unity of mankind in Bible, 366. 
Universities in Italy, 135. 
Universities of Sweden, 215. 
University of Cracow, 123. 
University of Vienna, 23-31. 
Upsala's temple, 201. 
Uri and Unterwalden, 267, 270. 
Uri, Landesgemeinde of, 278. 
Usurer in Armenia, 15. 

Valdemar the Victorious, 218. 

Valera, 174. 

Van, its depopulation, 12. 

Van, rocks of, I. 

Vandalism, a barrier against, 21. 

Veit Stoss, 123. 

Veliko the Heyduc, 346. 

Verbbczy, Tripartite Institutes of, 40. 

Veto, absolute, in Norway, 188. 

Veto in Denmark, 230. 

Veto in Sweden, 211. 

Veto, suspensive, of king of Sweden, 

185. 
Vienna and Austria the bulwark of 

Christian Europe, 21. 
Vienna and "immorality," 25. 
Vienna and its surrounding country, 26. 
Vienna in 1848, 25. 
Vienna, its medical schools, 31. 
Vienna on Sunday afternoons, 26. 
Vienna, pleasure-loving, 25. 
Vienna the "lotus-eating town," 20. 
Vienna "the pleasure-loving," 22. 
Vienna, University of, 23, 31. 
Viennese music-loving people, 31. 
Vikings, end of, 204. 
Viking policy, 202. 
Vikings, the, 181. 

Villainage unknown in Castille, 170. 
Vitality of the Turk, 314. 
Vladimir of Kiev, 93. 
Voronegh, birthplace of Koltsov, 102. 



23 1SUU 



414 



Index. 




Waldemar "Day again," 219. 

Waldemar the Great, 218. 

Wallace, Sir Mackenzie, 109. 

Wallace, Sir Mackenzie, on Russia, 97. 

Waller on Turkey, 311. 

Wat Tyler, 238. 

Watchmen in Spain, 161. 

Watering-places in Austria, 31. 

IVathelet, Alfred, on Belgium, 251. 

Westphalia, Peace of, 60. 

White, Sir W., on Moussa Bey's trial, 
12. 

Whitman, Sidney, on German Culture, 
69. 

Whitman, Sidney, on Germany Poli- 
tics, 53. 

WJiy does not the Sick Man die ? by C. 
D. Collet t, 311. 

Wiesma, Treaty of, 225. 

Will of Peter the Great, III. 

William, Emperor, on Poland, 116. 

William Tell, 271. 

William, the late Emperor of Germany, 
56. 



William the Silent, 244. 
Winkelried, Arnold Von, 272. 
Women in Spain, 166. 
Women secluded in Russia, 94, 
Women vote at the Russian Mir, 97. 
Wordsworth on liberty's two voices, 91. 
Working men and risings in Poland, 

121. 
Working man in Belgium, 264. 
Working man in England, 238. 
Wycliff, 239. 
Wycliff and Luther, 245. 
Wycliff and telescope, 248. 

Yaroslav, first legislator of Russia, 93. 
Yebb, Professor, on Athens, 291. 
Ynglingar, 202. 
Young, Dr., on Rossetta Stone, 334. 

Zadruga, the, 355. 

Zamoyski, Count, 119. 

Zhitov, Madame, on Turgueniev, 107. 

Ziska, John, 238. 



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